Gyrodyne, LLC (GYRO)

[Enterprising Investor]

Gyrodyne clears hurdle for St. James development (3/31/22)

By Nicholas Spangler

Gyrodyne won subdivision approval Wednesday night for its 75-acre St. James property, among the largest mostly undeveloped sites in Smithtown and western Suffolk County.

Smithtown’s five-person Planning Board voted unanimously with no public deliberation after two-and-a-half hours of comment. The former defense contractor’s application sought to divide its property into eight lots for uses such as a hotel, assisted living and medical offices. Catering facility Flowerfield Celebrations, located at the site, will not be altered by the subdivision and its operations will continue.

Subdivision is not necessary to develop the North Country Road property, most of which is zoned for light industry, but it will let the company sell or build on pieces of its land. of its land. The massive property was once home to a helicopter manufacturing facility and before that, a flower bulb farm. The company still needs final subdivision approval from the town for technical and engineering matters, along with individual site plans and perhaps special exceptions. Town officials said last week that any construction was at least a year or a year-and-a-half away.

Wednesday night’s hearing was contentious, mostly on battle lines established after the company submitted its application in 2017. Neighbors who participated in the hearing, which was conducted virtually, said the company’s plans threatened to destroy a bucolic corner of the North Shore through increased traffic and unsightly concrete. Gyrodyne representatives said they were careful to mitigate any negative impacts from development by including in their designs a vegetative buffer along North Country Road, forbidding left turns into and out of a complex entrance, and other steps.

“When it’s gone, it’s gone — we’ll never get it back,” said Arlene Goldstein, a St. James artist who spoke about the rural feel of the area.

Reprising their long-standing opposition to the project Wednesday night were Brookhaven Supervisor Edward Romaine and Head of the Harbor Mayor Douglas Dahlgard, who both represent constituencies near the Gyrodyne site but have had no oversight of the Town of Smithtown land use matter.

“There are a lot of people in my town that are adamantly opposed to this,” said Romaine, adding that area roads are already carrying far more traffic than they were designed to serve.

“This is right on the border of our town," he said, "within 300 feet of the Stony Brook Historic District.”

A traffic study commissioned by the company during environmental review found the added traffic would be manageable. The town has set traffic load limits but neighbors questioned the veracity of the study. Some questioned the feasibility of monitoring and enforcement for those limits and others the town imposed as part of its subdivision approval, like a limit to wastewater flow for a proposed sewage treatment plant to serve the site.

A lawyer for Gyrodyne, J. Timothy Shea, Jr., did not rebut all concerns but said the company had designed the project specifically “so you won’t have to be burdened with traffic.” A Gyrodyne traffic expert who testified in 2010 that commercial development would cause traffic to skyrocket, had been speaking about land the company once owned in Brookhaven and since taken by Stony Brook University, not about its Smithtown holdings, he said.

https://www.newsday.com/amp/long-island/suffolk/gyrodyne-st-james-development-smithtown-planning-board-lapzlkl0