Three years after fire, Great Neck ready to break ground on new Village Hall

Three years after lightning struck Great Neck Village Hall, triggering a fire that rendered the building uninhabitable, Mayor Pedram Bral is ready to break ground on the village’s new $14 million home.

Bral is hopeful the groundbreaking will occur shortly after Labor Day. Earlier this month, the village awarded bids to four contractors to help build a Village Hall that will “bring honor and respect to the people,” he said in an interview.

“It’s going to be a historic building,” Bral said. “We’re not putting up a Taj Mahal, but at the same time, it has to be something that is functioning and respectable.”

Since the August 2022 fire, the village’s building department, court, zoning board and more have operated out of a series of trailers in the Department of Public Works’ parking lot.

“I don’t think it’s proper and respectful to have your Village Hall, that represents the people, in a trailer,” Bral said. “It’s difficult. You have to go from one place to another place; during the wintertime, it’s not an easy thing to do when you have ice and snow … and it’s freezing.”

On 'the main road'

The new building will be across the street from the trailers, at 765 Middle Neck Rd. The village purchased the unoccupied lot for $800,000, Bral said. The previous Village Hall building had been on Baker Hill Road, on the south end of the village just outside Great Neck Gardens.

“Middle Neck Road is the main road of the village,” Bral said. “I do believe that you want to have your Town Hall, Village Hall, City Hall, in the main section of the community, not in some small, dinky little place.”

The old village headquarters had not been “a proper facility for what it was supposed to serve,” Barton Sobel, the deputy mayor, said in an interview. Sobel has been a village trustee for the past 15 years, dating back to before Bral took office.

The old building was “dark and narrow,” Sobel said.

“There were all kinds of issues in that building. Low ceilings, and mold and termite damage, anything you could imagine in an old building,” Sobel said. “We have a village of 11,000 residents and we had a poor, improper, nonfunctional facility.”

Perhaps most disconcerting for Sobel was the old building’s basement and garage where records were stored.

“Just thinking about it makes me itchy,” he said.

Four bids awarded

The four bids were awarded to Riverhead-based Construction Consultants of Long Island Inc. ($10,568,000) for general contracting; Hirsch & Co. LLC ($790,000), based in Shelter Island, for plumbing; Intricate Tech Solutions ($789,000), of West Babylon, for mechanical; and to Deer Park-based Roland’s Electric Inc. ($1,530,000) for electrical services.

Jean Pierce, 85, a longtime Great Neck resident, said in an interview the building "seems like an awful waste of money." Pierce suggested the village could have simply used insurance money from the fire to repair the facility on Baker Hill Road.

"What are you, plating it in gold?" Pierce said. "If we function perfectly well in the trailers, it doesn't make sense to have this Village Hall cost so much." 

Bral attributed the price tag to prevailing wages and other rules and regulations associated with building public facilities.

"It turns out that the taxpayers end up getting screwed," Bral said. "This place would've been done for much less than what it is going to cost us to do if it was done by a private entity for a private use. Much less."

By Joshua Needelman

joshua.needelman@newsday.com

Joshua Needelman covers the Town of North Hempstead for Newsday. A Long Island native and University of Maryland graduate, his work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post.