The four Democrats on North Hempstead’s Town Board blocked Supervisor Jennifer DeSena’s first Building Department reforms since taking office during last Thursday night’s meeting.
The local law amending the town code would have required the town Building Department commissioner to make a decision on expedited permits within seven days and remove the Town Board’s ability to override the department’s decisions.
“Essentially with the current provision, getting a permit becomes a matter of who you know and how politically connected you are – not how valid your application is,” DeSena said during a statement before the discussion. “No other town has a provision like this and this current arrangement leaves the door wide open for potential corruption, favoritism and the development of a pay-to-play atmosphere to ensure the approval of an expedited application.”
The public hearing was the first item on the agenda and took over two hours to come to a vote in what was just under a four-hour meeting with much back-and-forth between council members and the public.
The current local law was added to Town Code on May 29, 2007, the same year five Building Department officials were charged that October after a 16-month investigation by then Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice for receiving favors and payments in exchange for granting permits without inspections.
All five were later convicted, including former Building Commissioner David Wasserman, who was sentenced to one year in jail in 2008 after pleading guilty to grand larceny and falsifying business records.
After DeSena’s statement, Democrats Mariann Dalimonte, Veronica Lurvey and Peter Zuckerman each issued statements saying that DeSena’s proposal does not help the Building Department and called for the formation of a task force, among other things.
A registered Democrat, DeSena was elected as a Republican in November.
About 33,000 building applications have been reviewed by the Building Department over the last five years, Dalimonte said. Of that total, the councilwoman said if this law had been in place, 56 would have been overturned, or 0.17 percent.
In March DeSena said that over the past five years, 390 expedited permit requests out of roughly 1,000 were disapproved by the Building Department with 56, or 14.4 percent, of them being overridden by a member of the Town Board. In that same time period, no expedited permits that were approved were ever overridden.
Dalimonte continued by suggesting a task force that would be composed of residents with expertise in the residential and commercial construction and make recommendations to the board, which was backed by Lurvey and Zuckerman.
DeSena, who later said she was in favor of a task force, asked the three members who have been on the board a combined 13 years where the urgency for a task force had been previously.
Dalimonte responded by saying Thursday night was the first meeting in her two years that the board has not faced a pandemic, based on White House Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci’s declaration earlier this week.
Councilman Robert Troiano said there was a “false assertion” that the Town Board is getting involved with things not under its jurisdiction.
Troiano clarified that board members are not making decisions on permits themselves but can provide expertise on one of the four criteria that applications for expedited permit requests must be meet, such as accommodating emergency situations, furthering public interests like job creation or economic development, providing an essential service or avoiding extreme financial hardship to the applicant, among others.
Troiano, who was on the board when the law was first passed 15 years ago, said it was made to give residents a public, accountable person who can make decisions if need be to protect residents.
During public comments, Building Commissioner John Niewender initially said he does not have a position or opinion on whether the law gets passed but will work with the “criteria set forth by the board.”
He said the department cannot take at face value when someone requests an expedited permit because the town runs the risk of letting someone who wants to solely flip houses, for example, jump in front of the line of other people who may have more pressing needs.
The commissioner, who has been in his role since 2004, asked the board to trust his decisions because that’s what he is paid to do and that he and his staff have the same tools as the Town Board to make determinations.
“All I can tell you is there are times when we feel strongly about something not being expedited and it does get overturned,” Niewender said. “It’s not my town, it’s my department and once it’s out of my hands and someone else overturns it, I move forward.”
When pressed by the board on the proposal’s wording, Niewender said there is a flip side to the long delays at the building department.
“We hear ‘how did this person get the request, he doesn’t even live here, why did he get that expedite’ and it’s because they falsely met the criteria or it got overturned,” Niewender said. “So I do agree that the power should stay with me.”
Residents who spoke in favor of the proposal included Matthew Donno, co-president of the Manhasset Chamber of Commerce, and Donna Squicciarino, trustee for New Hyde Park. Edna Guilor, former deputy mayor of Great Neck, called for more advocacy from council members.
During the vote, Troiano abstained, citing wording he said raised a legal issue.
Town Attorney John Chiara said the proposal was not legally problematic as written, but could be defective as applied because it makes the commissioner’s criteria for considering expedited permit requests “arbitrary and capricious” and not rooted in the four current criteria.
Zuckerman and Lurvey joined Troiano in abstaining. Dalimonte deliberated on voting after expressing her desire to change the wording of the proposal while also asking the board to consider tabling the discussion but voted no when neither of those requests was met.
DeSena and Republican Councilmen David Adhami and Dennis Walsh each voted yes.
Another rewording of the proposal can be added to the May 19 Town Board meeting agenda.
Saying you want to make a change on an issue that affects just one percent of applications isn’t even putting a toe in the water, let alone a hill to die on, trying. How about finding something more significant, that benefits the 33,000 who apply at the Building Department, or something that benefits all ToNH constituents, like how to conserve and fund dwindling potable water supplies from polluted aquifers, like helping to finish the long-delayed LIRR ESA project, and like facilitating overall economic development.
I’m a first-hand victim of the Town of North Hempstead Building Department. Rather than support a family with children to invest millions into a Forever home that doubles taxes and looks great, the Building Department is adversarial an is driving us to flip the lot to a cookie-cutter developer who will cheap out on a crappy McMansion and flip it to some poor sucker that thinks just because it’s expensive its good.
No place in America takes a year to get a residential permit.
North Hempstead has 1,000’s of 1950 Levittown era homes and 1,000’s of taxpayers like me who want to keep their lot and replace the house with a new one even though it would double their taxes.
Our politicians are too inept to fix the well-known problems in the Building Dept. They make promises, claim the other party stopped them, and fail.
DeSana, to date you have failed to fix the department. In corporate America we would just fire the entire team (100% of them, it’s a small team). It’s not a big team and it takes them a year to approve a permit that can be approved in weeks anywhere else in America. Just fire them all, it’s a cancerous culture.