A Baldwin development: Clavin retreats

Daily Point

Clavin caves, maybe?

After pressure from revitalization advocates, business executives and local residents, Hempstead Town Supervisor Don Clavin has backed down from his plan to issue a moratorium on development in Baldwin, Inwood and North Lawrence.

Clavin announced in a news release Wednesday that the town would withdraw the moratoriums, which were supposed to be the subject of a public hearing next week. Instead, the release said, the town board had put together “an alternative proposal” for how to handle development in those communities.

The alternative would eliminate the “design review board” that the town previously had established as part of its zoning, instead giving the town board itself “a more comprehensive role” in the project review process. On top of that, each “significant development project” would have to undergo a more in-depth environmental review in order to be approved. The town did not define which projects would fall under that requirement.

Clavin said in a statement that the proposal “is a commitment to residents that we will facilitate consideration of reasonable development proposals by the Town Board in a timely, effective manner,” adding that the town had a “direct responsibility to residents to do what’s best for America’s largest township to consider reasonable development while protecting the environment for future generations.”

Clavin did not respond to The Point’s requests for comment. It’s not known whether any part of the new town review process would come before the upcoming elections in which town council member Anthony D’Esposito is running for the GOP nomination to replace Kathleen Rice in Congress.

While advocates and local elected officials said they were pleased that the moratorium proposals had been withdrawn, they weren’t completely reassured that the problems had been solved. A news conference that had been scheduled for Thursday by the Baldwin Civic Association, the Baldwin Chamber of Commerce, local advocates and elected officials, including Nassau County Legis. Debra Mulé and Assemb. Judy Griffin, still will go forward as planned but now with a slightly different agenda.

“I think this is a victory for the community of Baldwin, that they put the pressure on the town and have advocated for themselves and I’m happy to have been part of that advocacy,” Mulé told The Point. “But we are still having the presser to say, ‘Now it’s time to get to work.’”

And Mulé defined the town’s “responsibility” differently than Clavin.

“The town’s responsibility is to listen to the people who live in Baldwin and to put forward what they are asking for, what they’ve been asking for for decades, and that is to revitalize their downtown,” Mulé said.

Griffin told The Point she doesn’t buy the town’s argument against a design review board and worried about what the town’s alternative plan would mean for Baldwin.

“As far as I’m concerned, this reversal is just a political play. I see this as just another delay tactic and another power play from them,” Griffin said. “It’s unfortunate that they’re using the people of Baldwin.”

— Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Talking Point

Muddying Zeldin as Cuomo’s man?

Nearly 11 years ago, then-State Sen. Lee Zeldin delivered gushing praise for then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a news conference in Freeport — a videotaped event that at least two of Zeldin's rivals in the GOP primary race for governor now find useful. The clip was from an event where the Democratic governor and Republicans in the Senate claimed victory for pushing through a two-year moratorium on the state’s saltwater fishing license fee.

In retrospect, now-Rep. Zeldin of Shirley might have gone a bit overboard with the kind of overblown flattery that can suffuse the more bipartisan state ceremonies. He thanked the first-term governor “for your unyielding vision and leadership and commitment to Long Island, not just the fishing community but to all of us, the taxpayers … And putting all politics aside, I would honestly say that if you were in the White House right now our nation would be in a better place today than it is.”

Of course, the president then was Barack Obama, so Zeldin crossed no risky partisan line by flattering Cuomo in this way.

The comment now makes the rounds in Republican circles at the behest of rival candidate Andrew Giuliani — just as his petition signatures for the primary ballot, and those of other insurgent candidates, are under challenge from Zeldin who is the party’s designee in the June 28 primary.

Both Giuliani and candidate Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive who opposed Cuomo in 2014, have sought to unfavorably link Zeldin to the scandal-scarred ex-governor against whom they’d earlier prepared to run this year.

Campaign strategists say it is standard fare for insurgents to seek traction and gain attention against a front-runner as they look to fend off elimination from the ballot. Candidate Harry Wilson didn’t play the Cuomo card, but said Zeldin is simply afraid of a primary because he lacks grassroots recognition and support.

But so far Giuliani, the son of the former NYC mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, seems to display the biggest appetite for throwing campaign stink bombs.

Namely, the younger Giuliani tweeted an attack on the employment of Jack Haggerty in the petition process as making Zeldin “unqualified to be governor.” Haggerty, an acknowledged expert in the process, served time for a theft case involving the 2009 Mike Bloomberg mayoral campaign.

Giuliani griped: “One of the Republican Candidates is using a convicted felon to run his ‘Election Integrity’ team. I will not stand for Fraud or Corruption, whether it comes from Andrew Cuomo or Lee Zeldin!”

But both Republican Party and Zeldin campaign officials told The Point on Wednesday that Haggerty is working for the party organization and not for the candidate’s campaign. Other vigorous internal Republican clashes are underway in other states. In Ohio, for example, U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance prodded debate when he said the federal government shouldn’t be doing “a whole lot” about the war in Ukraine. One of Vance’s GOP primary opponents, Mike Gibbons, said he “would crush” Russia with economic sanctions and supports arming Ukrainians “to the teeth.”

But in New York’s Republican scrum for an underdog nomination for governor, the divisions aren’t even that ideological.

So far it’s about negatives, numbers, positioning, and who’s doing what to whom — and the usual wondering at this point what a future “party unity” rally might look like.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Pencil Point

Lemmings

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Final Point

Farm-to-table pot

The state Cannabis Control Board just approved conditional licenses for three Long Island businesses to start growing the substance. That got The Point wondering: Did the towns or villages where those farms are located opt in or out from marijuana sales?

In other words, could the community enjoy farm-to-table produce?

Although the business doing the farming is not allowed to be involved directly in retail sales, the local politics are interesting. Communities, for example, might be home to greenhouses or outdoor fields to grow the plant, but not dispensaries or lounges to buy and consume it.

That state of things is certainly possible on Long Island, home to lots of farmland out east and also dozens of towns or villages that opted out of sales under the new marijuana legalization law.

Two of the three newly licensed cultivators, East End Flower Farm Ltd. and Plant Connection Inc., either didn’t respond to The Point or declined to share their actual farm locations due to lack of finalized sites and concerns about theft of their plants.

The third, Route 27 Hopyard, owned by Ryan Andoos and Mark Carroll, will have a farm in the Town of Brookhaven — which opted to allow marijuana sales, though it adopted zoning rules last year that laid out some restrictions.

Andoos suggested to The Point that most of the farm’s crops will likely stay on Long Island and even a lot within Brookhaven itself, even though he won’t be selling to consumers directly.

He said he wasn’t surprised that many LI jurisdictions opted “out” from pot sales, given the lingering stigma about the issue, and the chance to watch and see how the legalization regime works around New York.

The jurisdictions can opt “in” later, and possession is legal either way. Andoos thinks some Long Island locales are going to observe for a while, and then perhaps open their arms more to weed: “There’ll definitely be a change of heart.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano