Mount Sinai mall project scaled back

A Medford developer said Wednesday he will scale back a plan for a 30-acre outdoor Mount Sinai mall after the proposal divided a crowd of more than 100 during an emotional two-hour public hearing Tuesday night.

As proposed, Mount Sinai Village Centre is a 228,000-square-foot development with a clock tower, village green, retail and office space, and restaurants next to King Kullen near Crystal Brook Hollow Road.

A hearing at Brookhaven Town Hall in Farmingville attracted about 50 residents wearing yellow "I Support Mt. Sinai Village Centre" badges.

But dozens of residents also showed up to oppose the project, which they said would put smaller retailers in the area out of business and snarl traffic.

Developer Paul Elliott, president of Soundview Realty, said Wednesday that he will reduce the size of the major "anchor store" in the mall from 90,000 to 75,000 square feet. A buffer between the property and nearby residences will also be expanded by 30 feet, and the amount of preservation land will be expanded from 13 percent to 20 percent of the site, he said.

"It's going to bring the community together," Elliott said of the project. "It's going to create a village center that the Mount Sinai area just doesn't have."

At the hearing, Michael DiMarco of Mount Sinai defended the proposal. "We'd like to actually spend our own money in our own community," he said.

But Peter Oleschuk of nearby Rocky Point said only Elliott "will make money, everyone else will lose."

Supervisor Mark Lesko encouraged Elliott to reduce the size of the anchor store.

"People want to know why that building needs to be that large," he said.

The town board left the public hearing open for written comments for 45 days. Brookhaven also needs the Suffolk County Planning Commission to weigh in on the project before a vote, which could happen some time this summer, town officials said.

The hearing came on the same night the board approved another high-profile development project -- Artists Lake Plaza in Middle Island. That project, proposed by Breslin Realty of Garden City, was granted a critical zone change.

That development is slated to include two large stores, seven retail shops and 25 acres of athletic fields on the site of the shuttered Middle Island Kmart, one of the largest blighted sites in Suffolk County.

Environmentalists have expressed concern that the site is too close to the Carmans River.