Conflict over mall plan is taken to court If Town doesn’t respond to order about bid for Syosset center, Judge might take over permit-issuing process
By Daniel Wagner
October 31, 2006

In the latest bid to end more than a decade of wrangling over an upscale mall it hopes to build in Syosset, Taubman Centers Inc. has filed court papers that could place issuing a permit in the hands of the courts.

State Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Spinner yesterday signed an order giving the Town of Oyster Bay 30 days to respond before he considers granting Taubman's application to build an 860,000-square- foot mall on the site formerly occupied by Cerro Wire and Cable Co., according to Taubman attorneys with Weber Law Group in Melville.

The move follows numerous decisions over a four-year period in which courts have instructed the town to revisit its 2001 refusal to grant Taubman a permit necessary to build its mall.

Town Supervisor John Venditto said the developer had been negotiating productively, and charged that yesterday's motion was an attempt to pressure the town to act on a proposed compromise to downsize the project, which has drawn the ire of civic organizations and garnered strong support from construction unions.

"I look at this as, they're saying to me, 'Hey, Supervisor, we've made a real proposal to you, we've downsized this thing and ... we'd like an answer,'" Venditto said. He said Taubman's most recent proposal was the first one "made with a view toward addressing the concerns that the town and the town's residents have raised," and that it involved a building with fewer than the 750,000 square feet of retail space requested in an earlier stage of negotiation.

But in a statement released yesterday before the town had been served with the motion, the developer characterized the situation differently.

"Given our unsuccessful attempts to date to reach a settlement with the town, we are left with no choice but to re-enter the courthouse," Taubman senior vice president of development Steve Kieras said in the statement.

Because the 39-acre parcel, which lies on the north side of the Long Island Expressway at Robbins Lane, was originally zoned for light industrial use, the Michigan-based developer needs a special- use permit to build the mall. So far, the developer has convinced courts in three separate actions that the town's decision denying the permit was arbitrary and unjustified.

The town contends that Taubman has failed to provide additional information necessary for the thorough review that courts have demanded.

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