Woodmere Club owners sue these two villages

Woodmere Club owners Efrem Gerszberg and Robert Weiss have filed a lawsuit against the villages of Lawrence and Woodsburgh, seeking $65 million in damages — money they claim they have lost because of the limitations the Coastal Conservation District imposed on their plan to develop the club land, according to the suit.

The district was created in 2020 to limit the developers’ plan to build homes on the club property, which straddles three municipalities — Lawrence, Woodsburgh and Woodmere, a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead.

According to the lawsuit, filed in federal court on Sept. 20 but just recently sent to the Herald, the owners are seeking to have the district judged “null,” “void” and “unenforceable,” and are asking for $25 million in damages from Lawrence and $40 million from Woodsburgh.

Gerszberg and Weiss purchased the club property in 2017, and in 2019 proposed the construction of 284 single-family homes on it — 247 in Woodmere, 24 in Woodsburgh and 13 in Lawrence, to be called Willow View Estates — a plan that was met with opposition from area residents and local elected officials.

The Coastal Conservation District, created by the town and the villages, divided the golf club property into three subdistricts and reduced the scale of the plan to 59 homes — 41 on Town of Hempstead property and 18 in Lawrence and Woodsburgh.

The town was not named in club owners’ suit, which claims that the district is an “unconstitutional taking of property without compensation.”

Because the district reduced the allowable number of homes to be built by over 83 percent, the suit states, it severely impacted Gerszberg and Weiss’s expectations for the potential development of the property when they purchased it.

In 2020, when the new zoning was approved, Bruce Blakeman, a town councilman at the time and now the Nassau County executive, noted its importance.

“I believe that this is a reasonable development, and what we are doing here will help environmental and traffic issues in the neighborhood,” Blakeman said.

Gerszberg and Weiss have sought variances from each of the municipalities in order to follow through with their original plan for the club property. At a village Board of Appeals meetings last July in Lawrence, Gerszberg and attorney Christian Browne presented an application seeking a variance to build homes on club land in one of the subdistricts, which is termed “open space.” A similar application was presented at a Woodsburgh Board of Appeals meeting in September.

According to the Coastal Conservation District, however, the two allowable uses for “open space” are the golf course or other passive recreation. The lawsuit argues that the use of open space for a golf course would be “physically impossible,” and seeks a variance to build homes instead.

“The inclusion of the golf course use within the Open Space Subdistrict is thus an illusory,” the lawsuit states. “It is an attempt to disguise the fact that the Open Space Subdistrict creates the equivalent of a park out of privately owned land.”

Have an opinion on the potential development of the Woodmere Club? Send a letter to jbessen@liherald.com.