It was Thursday, Aug. 3, a meeting of the Board of Zoning Appeals of the Village of Great Neck.

From the beginning I watched with growing unease. Only two of the five members of the BZA showed up. There was a third person who is on the village website as an alternate for an unspecified one-year term. Before the meeting started I asked: How can the BZA hear applications and vote on variances to the zoning code with only two of the permanent board members? Chairman Dennis Grossman gave a vague reply.

Usually applications continued from a previous date come first, followed by new ones. The chairman reversed this, a new application came first.

Residents went to the podium and raised their legitimate objections. The two board members swept these away by explaining the workability of the variances.

Then board member Charles Segal left for 20 minutes. We waited, during which a fellow observer told me that at the previous meeting he had been gone 40 minutes.

Next came the application from the United Mashadi Community of America for their project on Steamboat Road. This is an old application from 2019 reinvented. It started as a recreation center. Now it is to be a synagogue and religious school. You could say they traded one dinosaur for another, an herbivore for a carnivore, though both weigh 12,000 pounds.

Drive by it and you will see their building already in progress, its steel skeleton fixed against the sky. It dwarfs its suburban surroundings. Picture Tyrannosaurus Rex making its home next door to you. With every footfall you will feel its presence.

At this point, the attorney for the United Mashadi Community of America, Paul Bloom, spoke from the podium to the two board members. He is a BZA fixture, a regular representative of outsized and unacceptable applications for variances. He and the two BZA member talked with each other as though there was no one else in the room, the other 20 of us. He made a cheap joke at the expense of the Great Neck Park District.

The zoning code is a minimum standard, so you would expect a request for a deviation would tread lightly. Yet the Mashadi presented a two-page list of variance requests. As variances were mentioned, Grossman instructed the village attorney to write it down and make it so.

When the schmoozing between the podium and the two board members was done, suddenly Segal was on his way out the door and Grossman was about to pivot after him. I protested on behalf of residents waiting to speak. He replied that they (the BZA) had labored in “March, April, May and where were you then!” A check of BZA agendas in those months shows the Mashadi application only in May.

At this point attorney to the BZA, Stephen Martir, approached and spoke quietly to Grossman. You didn’t have to hear to know what he was saying. Items on a BZA agenda are hearings, a legal matter, with a stenographer, the BZA being quasi-judicial. In addition, this meeting had not been gaveled to a close.

Grossman called Segal back. I walked to the podium with the paper on which I had prepared what I would say. Segal told me that people who have not spoken go first, and he gestured to a man to come forward to the podium. I had not spoken about this application, so I wondered if Segal was comfortable displacing me because he is a man or because I am a woman.

The variances requested by the United Mashadi Community of America are numbered, and thanks to calculations by our fellow residents, the Bardash family, we know the percentage by which each variance will undercut the zoning code: 1. 64%. 2. 87%. 3. 457%. 4. 271%. 5. 126%. 7. 1,500%. 10. 70%. 11. 391%. 12. 59%.

Imagine for a second any one of us homeowners being given such unbridled latitude. It was the impermissible becoming permissible, the illegal becoming legal.

In a letter I wrote in 2019 about the first iteration of this colossus, I had raised questions I was now raising again, such as the 77 parking spaces for a building projected to serve 6,000.

The BZA and the Mashadi have failed to even mention that Steamboat Road is the access roadway for the United States Merchant Marine Academy, part of our United States military readiness. Steamboat Road is two lanes, one each way. The Mashadi already impede transit at 54 Steamboat. Now, at 187-195 Steamboat with its token 77 parking spaces, blockage is inevitable.

Steamboat Road is also a primary access to the village of Kings Point at the tip of the peninsula and to Steppingstone Park and its waterfront on Long Island Sound.

In response, Grossman offered a dismissive assurance traffic will be OK, something about drivers of vehicles knowing to get out of the way in an emergency.

Overall, on Aug. 3 the two BZA members were deeply autocratic. They are two in a village of 11,000, yet they acted impatient and uncivil. It was their meeting, their territory, their decision, and the rest of us were just in the way.

If you think I’ve been harsh, please remember this: I have only the ability to describe the functioning of a sclerotic board and the greed of a developer, whereas they have the power to ruin the village.

The Board of Trustees of the Village of Great Neck shares culpability since they decreed the 77 parking spaces. Initially there was an attempt to usurp 200 spaces from the adjacent Great Neck Park District, parkland protected by state law. Wanting a scant 277, they settled for 77 and the BZA uttered not a whimper. Both boards failed their duty to the community and the future.

Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar

Great Neck