Keeping up with Island Park

There has been quite a lot going on in Island Park the last year or so, from construction projects to surveys and more. Some of the work sites, however, have gone quiet in recent months, leaving many to speculate on their status.

Barnum Island King Kullen

According to developer John Vitale, the King Kullen project is progressing. The plan calls for the construction of a shopping center featuring a King Kullen and a handful of other stores on property Vitale owns on southern Barnum Island, south of Austin Boulevard. The store would be built near Vitale’s other properties, including Warehouse 5 and the Bridgeview Yacht Club.

The completed King Kullen would be the only full supermarket in Island Park.

Part of the plan, however, calls for paving over Beach Avenue, which runs through the property. “With respect to the King Kullen project, pretty much everything is set to go,” said Town of Hempstead Councilman Anthony Santino. “There are still negotiations between Mr. Vitale and the town relative to the abandonment of the street. There will be some consideration from Mr. Vitale to the town, and we’re going back and forth with the cost of that. He wants to close it off and take it into his property, and town taxpayers have to be compensated for that.”

Harbor Isle condos

Also still in the works are condominiums proposed for the southern tip of Harbor Isle by developer Michael Posillico. “We just finished the agreement with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on our supplementary work plan for the environmental work,” Posillico explained. “We should be going back into the field sometime within the next month to start that up again.”

According to Santino, Posillico has been granted all necessary government approvals from the Town of Hempstead for his planned 172-unit complex. Posillico’s company still must conduct a supplementary study to determine the extent of contamination of the site’s soil. The plan needs to be completed before remediation — the important step of removing contaminated material — can begin, followed by construction.

Village reimagined

Last year, Posillico made a bold presentation to village residents that was tangential to his development: He wanted to help improve the village.

Posillico said he wanted to put the village on a track to be rezoned and reimagined in order to make it friendlier for developers and residents alike. “The goal — and for our project, selfishly — is that you want a reinvigorated Island Park village that is more active,” he said, adding that he wanted to make the village more attractive to make people more interested in his Harbor Isle development.

But the initiative has stalled. “We really haven’t had too much progress with it,” said Island Park Mayor Jim Ruzicka. “We’ve been concentrating on the budget and Gomie [Persaud, the former village clerk] leaving and everything else.”

The initiative has not progressed much past the conceptual stage. Posillico hired a design firm, Studio V, to do some preliminary sketches, and Ruzicka gave some of the sketches to county officials a few months ago during a meeting about a traffic study for Austin Boulevard. It was Ruzicka’s hope that some of the ideas from Studio V could be incorporated into the county’s plans for the boulevard.

“If you have more people who are wanting to go [to Island Park], they need to be able to get to and from there safely from the train station and the crossings [on Austin Boulevard],” Posillico said. “And right now it’s quite hazardous, and I think it’s somewhat preventing the desired redevelopment because the infrastructure layout is improper and outdated.”

Austin Boulevard study

The traffic study for Austin Boulevard — Island Park’s notoriously dangerous thoroughfare — is also moving forward.

According to Nassau County Legislator Denise Ford, the study is complete, and she is awaiting its results, which she should receive soon. “There’s going to be a small group of us that will meet with the people who did the study to go over it with them and see what their recommendations are, and then we’ll bring it out to the public,” Ford said. “The people who live in that area, we need to have their input. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.”

Ford confirmed that the study incorporated data for the King Kullen that will be built at the southern end of Austin Boulevard, to see how it will affect traffic in the area. And once the public sees the results, she acknowledged, some things may need to be changed.

“There may be fine-tuning, too,” Ford said. “It’s complete, until somebody wants to change something. In government, nothing’s every complete.”