A planned Uniondale community center's shifting Sands

Daily Point

Betting on … a community center

The saga of the brand-new community center in Uniondale — a 4,000-square-foot facility on Jerusalem Avenue that’s been shuttered since February 2022 — finally saw some good news this week.

The center was part of a 6-year-old community benefits deal with Nassau University Medical Center and Engel Burman, a developer that was building hundreds of rental apartments on the A. Holly Patterson nursing home campus. Engel Burman finished the center — but it never opened.

After more than a year of delays, Nassau Health Care Corp. — the parent of Nassau University Medical Center — came to an agreement this week with Uniondale Neighborhood Center, or UNC, a community group that’s been trying to open such a center for more than two decades. The Nassau Health board of directors voted unanimously Thursday to approve the agreement, which sources said runs for five years, with an option to renew for another five years.

“The Uniondale Neighborhood Center will be another fantastic resource on NHCC’s campus that will provide the community with a wide range of programming and events,” the board said in a statement. “This agreement will ensure the facility is utilized effectively and in a way that reduces NHCC’s costs. We are hopeful that this wonderful partnership will yield great results for area residents.”

The agreement came after months of stops and starts with NUMC, which initially wanted to issue a request for proposals to seek applicants to run the center, despite past communication with UNC that seemed to pave the way for the organization to do so. After Newsday published a column about the community center in February, elected officials renewed the conversation.

But the real effort to find a solution didn’t begin until Nassau County Legis. Siela Bynoe raised the issue at a legislature committee hearing on May 8 regarding Las Vegas Sands’ proposal to build a casino at the Nassau Hub, also located in Uniondale.

“A community benefit was articulated. It was promised. The promise was unkept,” Bynoe said at the hearing.

Bynoe linked the complications over opening the center and turning it over to UNC to the fact that UNC’s involvement was articulated in a side letter, rather than the lease itself. Then she emphasized the importance of better enforcing any community benefits agreement with Sands.

“I wanted to make sure we were able to plug some of the gaps in the community benefit agreement between Sands and the county as it related to Uniondale and the surrounding community. But I also wanted to make sure that we honored some of the community benefits and commitments that were made on earlier deals,“ Bynoe told The Point Friday. ”If the community is to trust the county to ensure that these benefit packages are created and later conferred on to them, we needed to illustrate that by righting the wrong of the UNC transfer.”

Bynoe’s decision to raise the community center issue at the hearing put it on the front burner and forced county officials to move forward on the issue, sources told The Point. UNC chief David Greaves told The Point that after that initial Sands hearing, efforts to come to a deal with NUMC picked up. And in the weeks between the May 8 hearing and the May 22 vote, as Bynoe and others worked to improve the Nassau Hub community benefits package with Sands and county officials, the effort to open the community center also became a key part of the conversations and negotiations, too.

Ultimately, Bynoe voted to transfer the Nassau Coliseum lease to Sands. And in the weeks after the vote, the deal between NUMC and UNC came together, leading to Thursday’s Nassau Health board vote.

Both Bynoe and State Sen. Kevin Thomas, who has also worked on the UNC-NUMC arrangement, said they now would be working to make sure the community center opens quickly — and that future community benefits end up in Uniondale’s hands.

“This building is now theirs,” Thomas said. “This is a promise that a developer gave them and it has been met now.”

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

Pencil Point

MAGA mania

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Final Point

Redistricting cases could have far-reaching impact

If the redrawing of House maps for the 2024 election is your focus, keep your eyes right now on the Supreme Court and New York’s appellate courts.

First, a radical idea the Supreme Court is considering, called the independent state legislature theory, could upend nonpartisan redistricting commissions and state constitutional bans on gerrymandering. At issue is a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court which invalidated the North Carolina state legislature’s gerrymandering under the state Constitution. Republican lawmakers appealed arguing that legislatures, not state courts, should have the final word on drawing the House maps. Surprisingly, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case, Moore v. Harper, but the justices seemed very skeptical of the theory during oral arguments in January.

While the case originated in a Republican-controlled state to stop a court challenge to gerrymandering and other election measures, New York’s process could be upended as well. Last year, the state’s top court, citing the New York Constitution, found that the Democrat-controlled legislature unfairly gerrymandered its House lines.

A Brennan Center for Justice analysis said a Supreme Court ruling favoring the North Carolina legislature would directly impact Harkenrider v. Hochul, the 2022 decision by the New York’s top Court of Appeals, one of the “hundreds upon hundreds” that could be thrown “into disarray.”

Even if the Supreme Court sidesteps the North Carolina case, a more direct challenge to Harkenrider could wind up back at the state’s top court and eventually the Supreme Court. Harkenrider’s two-pronged ruling not only invalidated the maps imposed by Democrats but also let a court-appointed expert draw the lines. A Democratic challenge to reopen the second part of the case and draw new lines for 2024 was argued in an Albany appeals court last week with a decision expected by July. With control of the House of Representatives on the line, the case will likely be back before a newly reconstituted Court of Appeals.

The most salient issue that came up in the arguments before the Appellate Division’s Third Department is whether the once-a-decade, post-census redistricting can be redone before the full 10 years are up. And that requires an interpretation of the federal Constitution.

So the decision the Supreme Court hands down in the next weeks regarding the pending North Carolina case is the first threat to keeping the current New York map in place, but it’s very likely there soon could be a second, more specific threat to the map winding its way up to the nation’s top court.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

Programming Point

The Point will be back Tuesday, June 20. Happy Juneteenth!