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Mostly Cloudy With deadline past, a plea for more rentals
Community leaders join developer before town board
With his self-imposed deadline of June 30 behind him, developer Michael Posillico went before the Hempstead Town Board on July 9, asking it to fast-track a development proposal for Island Park that would bring a mix of condominiums and rental units to the community.
Posillico was joined in his plea by Glenn Ingoglia, the president of the Island Park Chamber of Commerce. “How important would it be to send a message that Island Park is back?” Posillico asked the board.
“We ask to get this [development plan] before the board as soon as possible, to give Island Park a priority,” Ingoglia said. “We need people to patronize our businesses or they might not last.”
Posillico, in partnership with the Virginia-based Avalon Bay Communities, plans to build a development called the Battery at Harbor Isle & Avalon Yacht View in the southern corner of Harbor Isle, a community in Island Park. The $90 million project would include 140 rental apartments and 32 condominiums, and most of the condos having top-end amenities such as boat slips.
The Town of Hempstead, however, has a covenant on the books that limits the number of rental units in any new development to 10 percent of the total number of units to be built. The covenant, if it is not lifted by the town, would restrict the partners to building fewer than 20 rental units, something that Posillico considers to be not economically feasible in the current housing market.
Both he and Avalon, which has a number of other similar developments in Nassau County, have asked the town to lift the covenant.
Posillico had previously given the board a deadline — the end of June — at which he and his partner would walk away from the project if the town had not lifted the covenant. He said that the deadline was necessary because of constraints placed on him by the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program. The 11-acre site, which formerly hosted the Cibro oil transfer station, has been vacant for more than a decade and is part of the cleanup program, which was set up to remediate toxic waste sites such as Cibro.
