By Justin Izzo
When you talk to Paul Lancey, his frustration over the process to approve the Lighthouse project becomes apparent.
“I don’t think it’s ever taken this long to build anything,” said Lancey. “Except maybe the Great Wall of China.”
Lancey is the senior vice president of marketing and communications for the Lighthouse Development Group, which plans to turn the area surrounding the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island into a 21st-century suburban hub.
The plan, headed by New York Islanders owner Charles Wang and construction mogul Scott Rechler, reads like a developer’s dream. 2,300 homes A new five-star hotel. A quarter million square feet of convention space. A half million square feet of stores and restaurants. A million square feet of office space. All of this surrounding a state-of-the-art arena to house the Islanders, concerts, and other sporting events.
“It’s the future of suburbia,” said Lancey “Long Island was the first suburb, and now they need to form the next generation of suburbs.”
The Coliseum is one of the oldest arenas in the NHL, and has not gone under a serious renovation since it first opened in 1972.
“It’s been bad for a while,” said Matthew Carbone, an Islander fan from Howard Beach, Queens. “They’ve needed to widen the concourse and improve the game day operations for over a decade now. It has gotten even worse as time has passed.”
Wang bought the Islanders in 2000 with the intention of renovating the Coliseum. The Lighthouse Project was born in February 2003 after Nassau County told Wang that it was not financially viable to renovate the Coliseum by itself.
The plan is being branded as a way to create both jobs for citizens and tax revenue for the state. The project also plans on being entirely privately funded, meaning it won’t cost Nassau County taxpayers a cent.
Despite these factors, the proposal has caused a lot of tension of late among development group members and Town of Hempstead executives. The Lighthouse Development group is pressuring the Town to push the project through and allow them to start building. But the Town is unwilling to rush the state-mandated environmental review that the project is required to go through. The result has led to frustration on both sides.
Lancey points the blame at the flawed structure of the Nassau County government.
“The process is slowed because the county and the town have to approve two separate parts of the project,” said Lancey. “The county approved us already for the use of the land, and the Town of Hempstead has to approve the zoning and environmental regulations. A similar development, the Westgate development (in Glendale, Arizona), started around the same time as us. They just played the Super Bowl in that development. They were able to work much quicker than us because everything was approved by the county.”
While the Lighthouse Development Group wants to speed up the proceedings, the Town of Hempstead doesn’t see a problem with how things have gone so far.
“I’d say the process is going faster than normal for a project of this magnitude,” said Town of Hempstead spokesperson Susie Trenkle. “It also took 22 months for the proper applications to be delivered to us so we could start our review process. We can only work so quickly now since we have to perform the proper state-mandated environmental reviews.”
The frustration has spilled over into the press as well, which have mostly painted the Town of Hempstead as a villain. This, according to B.D. Gallof, who covers the Islanders for his blog “Islanders Independent”, has precipitated the feud between the two groups.
“The Town of Hempstead read stories that say the project is dragging in the press, and they get defensive,” he said. “The Town feels like they’re simply doing what they have to do, and they don’t understand why they’re being pressured.”
The Town has also suggested that the project could move even faster if Wang scrapped the rest of the proposal and simply focused on renovating the Coliseum.
“The Coliseum could be renovated easily by itself right now,” said Trenkle. “The other components to the project are stalling it.”
But Lancey says that the project would not be economically viable without those additional components.
“It would cost us $400 million to renovate a building we do not own,” he said. “The rest of the components, they will generate jobs and money to make the project economically viable.”
The sense of urgency surrounding the project is related to the fact that Wang has reported losses of $20 million per year since he bought the Islanders nine years ago, thanks to a poor lease deal on the Coliseum with the SMG Corporation that prevents the Islanders from collecting any revenues from concessions and parking at the Coliseum. Wang recently told Newsday that he never would have bought the team had he known it would take this long to approve a new arena.
“He’s pushing the project so he can stop losing money,” said Gallof. “But he’s made a habit of raising unreasonable demands throughout.”
One of these demands has been setting a deadline of October 1, 2009, for a clear-cut decision on whether the project will become a reality. If no decision is made by then, said Lancey, Wang will turn the opportunity of building a new arena for the Islander franchise to other groups, no matter where those groups are from. Rumored destinations could be as close as Queens or as far away as Kansas City, where the Islanders will play an exhibition game next season.
“Charles doesn’t want to move the team,” said Lancey. “But he can’t wait forever for the Town to make a decision.”
Trenkle argued that the Town has no choice but to do its job completely, no matter how long that takes.
“We simply cannot lean one way or the other on the project until the review process has been completed,” said Trenkle.
Gallof thinks the Town should get as much time as it needs to complete the project.
“It would be irresponsible for the Town to approve the Project without completing the environmental inspection,” added Gallof. “Delaying the start of the project is more important than, say, poisoning the water supply of Uniondale.”
Gallof is also skeptical of the idea that the death of the Lighthouse project would mean the end of the Islanders on Long Island.
“NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has found ways to keep Stanley Cup-winning franchises in their cities in the past,” he said. “The Long Island market has proven time and time again that it is a viable NHL market when it has a winning hockey team, and Bettman knows that.”
Carbone mainly supports the project because he wants to keep the team on Long Island. But he also likes the concept behind it.
“I want the team I grew up rooting for to stay on Long Island,” said Carbone, who is now 32. “But the project is a cool idea as well. It seems like it would be a great place to live. I may even consider bringing my family (he has a wife and a daughter) there one day to live.”
Lancey hopes that people like Carbone will be the people who fight to get the project approved.
“It’s our vision,” he said, “but it’s up to the next generation to step up and fight to get it approved, since they’ll be the ones living there.”
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