Dear Members of the Nassau County IDA Board:
I had thought this proposal died back in September in response to our community’s opposition. Instead you have given it fresh oxygen.
The reappearance on your agenda of this unworthy request for tax relief causes me to think that either the IDA is uninformed or misled: either you lack relevant knowledge about our community, or you are deceived. These are the only choices to explain why you continue to smile upon a plan that will do damage to our Long Island suburb.
For my part, let me provide you with information you lack or have overlooked, to refute the representations from our mayor to you on behalf of this developer, whose interests he champions over ours.
When Mayor Pedram Bral replaced our village’s carriage street lights with ones known as cobras, he faced a wealth of new medical research cited by residents that conveyed the potential harm to pregnant women and children from high intensity LED lights. On his way to dismissing the emerging and troubling research, the mayor denigrated the AMA (American Medical Association) and Harvard University. He then gave the contract to a company based in Canada.
So your assertion that this project has value for its local job creation should be prefixed by the word fleeting: they come from who-knows-where and then are gone.
Look at this applicant, seeking a 22-year tax relief. Gesher is based in the state of Connecticut. Rabbi Shemtov, who is the putative owner of the site, lives on Arrandale Avenue in a Residence AA zone, from which no business can be conducted because that violates the village zoning code. So the applicant is not local, and its mailing address is not legitimate.
Great Neck is a peninsula, a piece of information absent from your deliberations. A peninsula has immovable physical boundaries, unless you want to push residency onto houseboats in the waters around us. Anyone wise enough would anticipate the consequences of promoting overdevelopment on a delimited land mass.
For one thing, overdevelopment imperils our peninsula’s supply of fresh water. Instead of entertaining this decision in a vacuum, look to the people of California, who cannot find water for their crops, a mainstay of their state’s economy. Their water has been disappearing over time, even from the depths of their acquifers.* Yet the IDA would send our peninsula down the same future path.
The United States Geological Survey in cooperation with Nassau County studied our Great Neck fresh drinking water supply from the wells beneath us. That study found two wells at the north of our peninsula are closed due to salt water intrusion. Salt water intrusion is caused by over-pumping, which in turn results from the proliferation of…water faucets.
Count the number of faucets in the Gesher plan of 4 stories with 63 apartment units. Estimate the volume of fresh drinking water to be used up in one year by this one apartment building. Then calculate well closures.
(Recently the mayor and the trustees approved a swimming pool for a 36-unit apartment building. When faced with a denunciation about the waste of fresh drinking water, the mayor’s rejoinder was memorable: He said, you only fill a swimming pool once.)
The day will come when the Great Neck peninsula will have to ask New York City, or beg New York City, to let us tap into their upstate reservoir for fresh drinking water, and the city will see our request as competition for a dwindling supply of potable water.
My final topic is money. My husband and I pay taxes to the state, county, town, village, and special districts. We support our schools and our library.
My village, the Village of Great Neck, is by far the largest of the nine villages, and the properties off the tax rolls in my village have a ripple effect. Seventeen percent (17%) of village land is not taxed. The land owned by government and institutions provides a public service to all of us, to which is added tax relief to religious institutions. To all that add the queue of properties applying to be newly free of taxation in my village.
It is not a matter of whether someone is a senior citizen or a breadwinner for a young family. None of us can afford to pay for the mayor’s generosity to developers, and none of us can afford for the IDA to grant this carpetbagger, Gesher, tax relief and then transfer its tax burden to us, the homeowners. Gesher follows the developers of Avalon Bay, 191 units relieved of taxation.
There is an unpleasant side effect of irresponsibility by the mayor and trustees followed by an irresponsible decision by the IDA: These actions cause homeowners’ tax payments to increase, and then residents incorrectly place the blame on the institutions.
Each tax bill we homeowners receive holds secrets. Were the IDA to grant Gesher a 22-year tax relief, that secret in my tax bills will be how much more I pay to cover what Gesher does not pay. A tax holiday for Gesher would be a secret simultaneously on every institution’s tax bill.
No matter how well-reasoned the budgets are for the institutions that serve us year after year (public schools, library, parks, water, sewage, fire protection, ambulance, police), when the tax bills arrive we are expected to pay sums transferred to us unseen.
The application for tax relief for 733-741 Middle Neck Road is a put-up job. The owner held the property on our main road for years and let it fall into decline and decay. Then the mayor proclaimed it an eyesore. An application to build 20 units ballooned to 63 in a building that will leave no permeable ground around it.
Gesher asked to put the apartment building’s drywells in the adjacent residential rear yard, and the result is more sticky business.
This project is not IDA-worthy, and, as is the nature of bad decisions, it would inevitably throw into question other decisions the IDA renders. Bad things have a tendency to live on.**
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck