Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Communities Working Hard to Plan Their Future

What a whirlwind of a week. Three communities we are involved in have had meetings to tackle their future growth and development.

Without much fanfare, the Village of Farmingdale finished its visioning process with a number of accomplishments, including a revitalized public park/village green and fountain, traffic calming road projects, and four new development projects including market rate and affordable housing mixed with retail use. We will be updating you with more detailed results of these accomplishments. In this case, the community was positive but cautious and the Village took the lead, working hard for implementation.

In Rocky Point, the community kicked off a visioning project to revitalize its downtown through zoning changes, realigned parking, investments in sewer infrastructure, and a new mix of retail, along with additional housing, in the downtown. At this time, the driving force behind this vision is the civic community, but the local property owners and Town of Brookhaven, the sponsor of the planning process, are not far behind.

In Shoreham, the Tallgrass proposal for a PDD of 352 units of housing, 125,000 square feet of commercial space, ballfields, a village center, village green, and farmers market was approved 5-2 by the Brookhaven Town Board. This project showed the developers, Ornstein Leyton Companies, accepting an alternative to a 283 unit residential subdivision. Clearly, this was the longest and most contentious of the three projects, taking over 3.5 years, with the last 1.5 years being a visioning process that honed down some of the alternatives for a plan acceptable to the community. Of the endless letters, web posts, flyers, and e-mail blasts over the last few months with strong emotions and arguments, an anonymous message from a Shoreham resident on the Newsday blog sums it up:

We as residents spoke loudly and essentially brought down the # of units from over 700(Day 1) to now 352. The system worked. The input of all was heard. Everyone had a seat at the table over 3.5 years.. Now - lets all get over it and paint the canvas with the best community on Long Island. I remain greatly positive of the future of Shoreham, It's Schools and this new community. Shoreham - Time to heal and go forward in a positive manner.

After ten years of proposing different medium to large scale mixed use projects, this is the first time a new town center has been approved on Long Island. The developer took the lead in this case, but the Town of Brookhaven should be credited for taking on a very difficult decision in a highly charged political environment.

I suppose the message we are sending here is that these three communities (as well as many others) have worked hard at planning their future. If they can work through difficult issues, we all can make better land use and planning decisions. The system is not broken; we just need to work together, roll up our sleeves, and work harder and more effectively.

Eric Alexander
Executive Director

Posted by Eric at 7:26:57 AM in Blog (23) | Comments (1)

Comments

1. laurie said...

which new town center are you referring to? I live in Brookhaven and am not aware of this. thank you.

2/23/2008

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