By: Tom Jordan
It's in the hands of the courts now. Home Depot has filed suit against Rockville Centre, hoping to spur the village to approve an application it submitted last spring to build a 134,000-square-foot store on Banks Avenue.
The Village of Rockville Centre was not treating the application or acting on it in what we felt was a timely manner, said John Simley, Home Depot public affairs manager. The lawsuit, essentially, is meant to encourage the village to give the application a proper review. It's a standard procedure, but it's not the way we like to do things.
The suit was filed Feb. 26 in the Nassau County Supreme Court, and the village has until March 16 to respond. Comments from local officials could not be gotten for this article.
Home Depot's application to build in Rockville Centre was first submitted to the Building Department in April 2000. Had the proposed site plans received a quick approval from the village, Home Depot planned to open a retail store this year where the Darcy Drug Building now sits. But an independent traffic study done in September at the request of Home Depot halted the project, at least temporarily, when it concluded that the proposed development had the capacity to generate considerable traffic. As a result, it called for the elimination of public parking on both sides of Morgan Days Lane and on the east side of North Centre Avenue between Sunrise Highway and Front Street be eliminated.
Village Administrator Anthony Cancielleri said at the time that making major adjustments to roads and the removal of parking were never options the village was willing to consider.
The traffic study was done, in part, to address the fears and concerns of residents and business owners, particularly those in the immediate area of the proposed site, where several of the Village's larger commercial buildings operate, including King Kullen, and the MTA/LI Bus Terminal. A second study is due to be released soon.
The company spokesperson said that it is not unusual for a traffic study to be done more than once because the engineer may want to reevaluate certain material. He also said that the construction of a Home Depot in the village might relieve traffic congestion rather than aggravate it.
When we discuss making these changes to the roads, our goal isn't just to accommodate the extra traffic to the store, but to improve the conditions of the roads from what they are currently, Simley said. We don't want there to be problems getting to our store. We don't want it to be hard to shop at Home Depot. If that were the case, we'd be better off out in the suburbs.
Simley said stores in Deer Park and Huntington did not cause the predicted traffic nightmares. The way to deal with the traffic is sometimes a matter of adding lanes and signals. Sometimes it's as simple as synchronizing traffic signals, he said.
When the first study was released, MTA/LI Bus spokesman Frank Ryan stated his concern over what was not addressed.
I am amazed that there was no mention of consideration for MTA/LI Bus and the flow of buses in and out of that depot, he said.
Now, with a second study currently being conducted, the Rockville Centre Fire Department is concerned about how a Home Depot might impact on its ability to protect the community. Because neither traffic study addressed what impact, if any, a Home Depot would have on emergency responses, the Fire Council is discussing yet another traffic report. They've sent information to the village trustees.
The fire department has forwarded to me copies of internal correspondence between the various fire companies about the difficulties in getting out of the station on North Centre Avenue. I immediately forwarded that information on to the village administrator, the mayor and the other trustees, Trustee Jack Matthews said. Before he was named to the Village Board last year, Matthews, a lawyer, represented Home Depot in the early stages of its application to build in Rockville Centre.
Local merchants have been outspoken in protesting the arrival of Home Depot. Jay Balkan of U.S. Lumber and Peter Pouri and Peter Holfelder of Holbro Paint have accused Home Depot of saturating
