East Rockaway officials vote to end sub-division moratorium

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The East Rockaway board of trustees voted to end a ban on subdividing houses in the village at a public meeting on April 9.

The ban was instated to provide village officials with time to determine the affects of tearing down older houses on oversized lots to create smaller properties, village officials said. Last October, the board voted to extend the moratorium for six months.

“We just wanted to see how many properties there were,” Trustee Richard Bilello said. In October, Trustee Gordon Fox also said that the building and planning departments were studying “the potential increase in traffic, increase in sewage [and an] increase in electricity.”

But now the study has ended, and residents are permitted to sub-divide larger houses as long as they meet with the village’s planning and building committees.

The moratorium stirred debate at a village board meeting on Oct. 16, 2017, when former resident Richard Ruggiano blamed the ban for his inability to sell his parents’ 32,000-square-foot house. He said that taxes are too high for prospective buyers, so they would have to divide larger properties into smaller ones to spread the tax burden.

“No individual can afford the property as it is,” he said at the time.

The vote to end the moratorium was unanimous.