Town planners, residents object to Smithtown real estate company's bid to expand parking lot

A Smithtown commercial real estate company’s application to expand its parking lot toward a residential neighborhood off Route 111 is in jeopardy after town planners recommended against approval. 

Board of Zoning Appeals trustees delayed until Jan. 24 a hearing for the application at the request of a lawyer for Island Associates Real Estate, 444 Rte. 111, to give the company time to revise its designs. 

“We think it’s a meritorious application but we have to find out if we can negotiate a reasonable settlement,” Timothy Mattimore, a lawyer representing a limited liability company connected to Island, said at an Oct. 25 board meeting. 

His request came after an Oct. 20 advisory report by planner Blaise Donadio that found the variances from town code the company requested were “substantial and could be harmful to the community.”

Designs filed with the town planning department called for Island to remove a stretch of woods that has for years separated its building from homes to the west to make way for 66 parking spaces there and elsewhere on its site. The spaces would extend 94 feet into a residence district but would be set back 28 feet from the west property line and 33 feet from the south property line, with a 10-foot planted buffer. The company would need a special exception to town zoning that forbids building parking in a residence area along with several variances, including one that would permit reduction of the required buffer. Zoning requires a buffer equal to the extension of parking into the residence area, or 94 feet. 

Mattimore did not respond to a request for comment. Island managing director Roger Delisle did not make himself available for an interview. 

Town planner Peter Hans told Newsday that town planning officials had in recent months seen “a lot of unused parking stalls” at the site. In coming months, he said, zoning appeals board members will weigh “if there’s really this need” for parking and whether alternative designs could provide more parking while better complying with town zoning.

In filings, company representatives have said the expansion was needed to augment its 137 existing spaces and ease a parking shortage that sometimes forces workers or building visitors to park on neighborhood streets. “There will be heavy vegetative screening added” and “lighting will be deflected away from residences,” according to the filings.

But residents questioned the company’s commitments. Island “has put up so many [parking] spots right against our property, with cars idling, people talking, people smoking,” said Paula Klingelhoefer, a semiretired school administrator who has lived north of the site on Fawn Place for 38 years. 

She said she and her husband spent thousands of dollars on evergreen trees to screen their property because of parking lot lights Island installed, and because plantings the company put up around the edge of its lot — “like a little bush” — didn’t provide much of a barrier. 

Especially galling, she said, was when an Island contractor tore down a concrete wall around part of the lot — at 7 a.m. on a recent Sunday morning. “He has not been a good neighbor,” she said.

Another resident, Steve Matteo, who works in publishing and lives on Tanglewood Drive, said the woods west of Island’s building helped block the almost daily rumble of a generator on the site, and helped absorb rainwater that would otherwise flood homes in the area.

He said he wasn’t optimistic about the January hearing. “We feel like we’re being taken for a ride — they’re not going to change their plans to accommodate us.”