Plan to repair Bayview Avenue in Manhasset hampered by permit delay

North Hempstead will restart a planned shoreline stabilization along a highly traveled Manhasset road next month after a nearly yearlong delay, officials said.

The town began work on the embankment that supports Bayview Avenue, which has long faced structural erosion, last October.

Bayview Avenue is about 1 mile long, from Plandome Road to East Shore Road, along Manhasset Bay. It connects Manhasset, as well as Great Neck, to the Port Washington peninsula. It has fallen into disrepair in recent years, residents say, because of structural erosion caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

But the $944,000 project was halted in November when workers located a small portion of land that had not been included in the existing state Department of Environmental Conservation permit.

The town reapplied for the permit in November, but it wasn’t granted until Aug. 26, Deputy Supervisor Joe Scalero said in an interview.

Conditions become especially precarious amid inclement weather, Doreen McDonough, a Manhasset resident and president of the Shorehaven Civic Association, said in an interview.

“There’s tremendous flooding during storms and it shuts down,” McDonough said. “It’s treacherous in the winter, with the icing and the roadway flooding there, it’s constant. Cars come over on the other side to avoid gigantic puddles in the road — that’s another danger.”

Since the delay, the town has blocked off the work area with orange cones and yellow tape that runs through overgrown shrubs.

“They’ve left all the construction stuff,” she said. “It’s littered down there, with garbage down there.”

McDonough added: “We are the forgotten area in this town.”

Supervisor Jennifer DeSena said in an interview she reached out to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office for help speeding up the permit process, and in May she met with two state officials in Manhasset to show them the road and the embankment.

She noted residents had expressed anxieties about driving past the slope following the removal of some vegetation.

“It made people feel exposed, because they’re going down a hill, and then making a left turn and traveling alongside the water,” DeSena said.

Scalero expressed frustration with the state’s timeline.

“It took [10] months to get a simple permit modification,” Scalero said. “The project would’ve been done this summer, but instead it’s barely begun."

A DEC spokesperson said in a statement the modified application "required several revisions" because of "delineation errors and further protections and mitigation needed for protection of sensitive tidal wetlands."

The agency "issued the permit modification as soon as all necessary criteria were met," the spokesperson said.

The town is covering the majority of the cost through bonding, town spokesman Umberto Mignardi previously told Newsday, with about $300,000 coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The project also includes street repaving, but that can’t be done until after the shoreline is reinforced with a revetment, which will include a layer of geotextile filter fabric and three layers of stone.

Scalero said the additional area of land included in the updated permit amounted to 960 square feet, about 10% of the total project.

Scalero said he expects the work to take about three months to complete, further delays from inclement weather notwithstanding.

The project represents another part of the town's ongoing effort to rebuild shoreline infrastructure damaged during Superstorm Sandy. In July, North Hempstead hired H&L Contracting LLC, of Hauppauge, for $11.9 million to transform and stabilize Town Dock in Port Washington.

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.