Planned Nesconset Starbucks with 2-lane drive-thru draws opposition

Nesconset residents say they can live with the Starbucks drive-thru planned for busy Middle Country Road near Smith Haven Mall but not a two-lane driveway opening onto a nearby residential street.

That street is Alexander Avenue, a 1.5-mile town road running west of the mall south through their neighborhood of split-level and two-story homes before terminating at Browns and Nichols roads. 

Developer Woodmere-based Basser Kaufman is scheduled to bring its application before the Smithtown Board of Zoning Appeals Sept. 13. Plans submitted to the town this spring envision a 2,700-square-foot Starbucks on what is now wooded land zoned for wholesale and service industry. 

The developer requested 10 variances, mostly to accommodate proposed coffee shop signs. The site plan shows driveways on Middle Country Road and Alexander Avenue, about 75 feet south of the Middle Country Road intersection. 

The Alexander Avenue driveway would throw unwelcome traffic onto a street already busy with drivers from outside the neighborhood looking for shortcuts to the mall or the Long Island Expressway, said Susan Fink, a retired Smithtown teacher who moved into the neighborhood in 1969. 

In 2014, Fink opposed a Sonic restaurant that was later built at the southeast corner of the Middle Country Road-Alexander Avenue intersection. She now fears that vehicles exiting or entering the two businesses, combined with traffic backed up at the intersection, would be "a recipe for accidents." 

The developer “has a right to use that property, but they shouldn’t just change the character of our neighborhood,” Fink said.

In 2019, the latest year for which a traffic count was available from the state Department of Transportation, average daily traffic for a nearby stretch of Middle Country Road was 29,286 vehicles. A traffic study commissioned by the developer this spring concluded the Starbucks “would not have a significant impact on the traffic operations of the adjacent roadway network,” generating an estimated 232 peak morning hour and 273 peak midday hour trips.

But Blaise Donadio, a Town of Smithtown planner, agreed with some of the neighbors’ concerns in a memo to town officials, warning that proposal details “could create significant traffic impacts” and “visual impacts.”

He told Newsday last week he anticipated revisions to the plans before the zoning board hearing to more closely follow town planners' recommendations. The Alexander Avenue driveway will likely remain, he said, but will probably be moved south. Any site with frontage on a town road is entitled to curb cut access, he said.

Lawyer Vincent Trimarco Sr., representing the developer, said plans were being revised but gave no details. “We want to do what’s best not only for us but for the residents,” he said. 

A spokesman for the state Department of Transportation said the agency was reviewing a work permit application for the site. 

Harold Goldrich, a retired state auditor who has lived in the neighborhood since 1978, said he opposed a driveway that would “dump” traffic onto a “residential” street. 

Years ago, “the moving man said, ‘Welcome to the boondocks,’ ” Goldrich recalled, before uttering the most Long Island of epithets: “It’s like Queens now.”