Garden City Mayor Robert Rothschild is correct when he says that the Village had every right to seek input into the approval process for the new 88-foot building that is to be built along the Mineola-Garden City boundary on Old Country Road. The Nassau County charter required that the project, when it was to be condominiums, be treated as a housing subdivision. This allowed a bordering municipality to object if it thought the scope of the project would have an impact on itself.

Clearly, putting 300 housing units right on the border between the two towns will have impacts on traffic congestion on that already severely overcrowded road. And (although Mineola Mayor Jack Martins has disagreed with us when we used this term in the past) an 88-foot building with only a 15-foot setback will seem to “loom” over the surrounding area. (The building across the street, while taller, is set very far back from the street.)

Unfortunately, the county charter did not include rental apartment buildings in the law that requires the input of neighboring municipalities, so because the developer has decided to change the project from condominiums to rentals Garden City no longer has a say in the matter.

All too often on Long Island projects are approved piecemeal with little thought to the cumulative regional impacts of increased density. Maybe if developers had to satisfy not just a town, but its neighbors as well, there would be less of a march towards urbanization of suburbia.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher