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Community Corner

Developer Updates Plans for Islip Pines Rezoning

Lawyers for Serota Properties outlined plans for Islip Pines, a proposed mixed-use development, at meeting of Long Island Metro Business Action.

Developer Serota Properties is asking Islip Town for a a change of zone that will allow it to build more than a million square feet of commercial/industrial space, nearly 500,000 square feet of retail space and 250 workforce condominium apartments on a 136-acre site in Holbrook, lawyers for the developer told a business group.

The Valley Stream-based developer, which has owned the site at the northwest corner of Sunrise Highway and Veteran’s Memorial Highway for 27 years, can build up to 2 million square feet of industrial space on the property under current zoning, the lawyers told a Friday meeting of Long Island Metro Business Action at the Holiday Inn in Ronkonkoma.  The developer is seeking a zone change to Planned Development District that would encompass the entire property.

Town and county planners, however, have maintained under comprehensive zoning for the Sunrise Highway Corridor, the site should remain zoned industrial.

The lawyers, Serota general counsel Michael Cassidy and its outside zoning attorney, Bram Weber of the Melville-based Weber Law Group, said potential industrial users spurned the site because it is too far south of the Long Island Expressway.

The plans, the subject of a planning board hearing last March, are expected to come before the Islip Town Board in 2012. The developer is currently responding to planning department comments on its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, Weber said,

Islip Planning Commissioner David Genoway said Serota was told in April the DEIS “didn’t contain what it was supposed to.” Specifically, he said, the DEIS needs more data regarding traffic, ground water and comprehensive plan issues. Genoway said the plan is inconsistent with “clear” comprehensive zoning policies adopted by the town and the Suffolk County Planning Commission in 1989 and 2008, respectively.

“We’re fighting an older vision for this property,” Weber told the gathering.

Under a revised plan, two big box stores, a multiplex cinema and smaller stores would be built closest to Sunrise Highway with the 250 1-and-2-bedroom apartments behind them on 13 acres along with recreational space including public ballfields.  The 1.3 million square-feet of industrial-office buildings would be built on about  70 acres and would also include a 200-room hotel. Power transmission lines that now run alongside the site would be buried.

Cassidy told the group the developer is open to discussions with town officials and members of the community about the property and that they plan future meetings with members of the community to solicit input.

The site abuts the Parkland neighborhood, built mostly in the 1970s. 

Construction of the entire project, expected to take three to five years, would generate 900 construction jobs and 2,600 permanent jobs when completed, Cassidy said. Taxes, currently $400,000 million, would climb to $6 million when the project is completed.

Cassidy said Serota has the necessary money to build the project and has reserved sewage treatment capacity, 210,000 gallons a day, at Parkland’s sewage plant. “The project is ready to be built,” he said.

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