Hicksville LIRR parking garage meeting stalls
The Hicksville LIRR parking garage as seen on Dec. 31, 2018. Credit: Howard Schnapp
Officials from the town of Oyster Bay and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have met in Mineola hoping to find a compromise on development in the hamlet of Hicksville. It didn’t go so well.
Oyster Bay and MTA officials told The Point they left the 90-minute, Friday afternoon meeting without the agreement both parties sought.
The meeting took place at the Long Island Rail Road’s third-track offices in Mineola, a meaningful location both because of the importance of adding an additional track to Hicksville’s future, and because Mineola’s redevelopment shows what’s possible.
The goal of the meeting: To find a way to allow the MTA to build a parking garage for Hicksville’s LIRR station, while utilizing town land to build some mixed-use development. The MTA has hoped to build up eight stories, while Oyster Bay wants just four.
Oyster Bay spokesman Brian Nevin and deputy commissioner of planning and development James McCaffrey told The Point that among the issues debated were the valuation of the town land, and how tall buildings could be. The central sticking point continues to be height. While town officials said they discussed the possibility of more height, no deal was reached.
“We were flexible in our vision for the property,” Nevin said of the debate over height.
While there were no new proposals to jumpstart the development efforts, both parties left open the possibility of reaching an agreement. MTA officials left the meeting with “homework,” said John McCarthy, the MTA’s chief of staff for construction and development. McCarthy said the MTA would take another look at its numbers to see whether lower heights or other compromises are workable.
“We’re trying to make progress. We all have a shared interest in improving the station area ...” McCarthy said. “We’re evaluating what can be done, but it still has to make sense as far as investing money and the return on that investment.”
The MTA’s involvement comes as the authority hopes improvements to the area will help its commuters and match well with its work on the third track and East Side Access connection to Grand Central Terminal. If the MTA were able to develop property in Hicksville, it could create additional opportunities to capture value for the authority’s own needs, too.
That, of course, could mean that buildings taller than four or five stories are necessary to make the math work.
Meanwhile, Oyster Bay is starting to move on a “parallel track,” looking for a way to utilize private developers. McCaffrey said that while the town will keep the MTA option available, the town plans to issue two requests for proposals in that effort. The first, which could be released as soon as Tuesday, will seek legal services to facilitate the sale or lease of the town’s land. The second, which might emerge next week, will search for a consultant who can help the town draft a request for qualifications for a master developer.
The plan, McCaffrey said, is to release that RFQ in slightly more than a month, to have the town’s rezoning finished by August, and to have construction on new mixed-use development begin by the spring of 2021. The next town supervisor election is that November.
“We said, we can’t sit back and wait any longer for them,” McCaffrey said of the MTA.
McCaffrey and Nevin said they’ve had discussions with half a dozen developers who think they can do what the town wants – produce mixed-use development that includes housing, but is no more than four stories tall, and includes structured parking.
Whether such housing will be at all affordable under such conditions remains to be seen.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
