Recently installed Chamber of Commerce President Bertram F. Donley (of Garden City Properties, Inc.) has issued a statement of firm support for the controversial Parking Buffer Strip Plan in a front page editorial in the most recent Business Bulletin from the Chamber. Entitled Where Do We Want to Be?, the piece defines the Chamber's role in the community as Donley sees it and discusses what Donley sees as critical for the future success of the downtown business area of the Village, specifically Franklin Avenue. Donley criticizes the Village and accuses those in opposition of the Plan of spreading misinformation.

Donley brazenly writes in his introduction, which addresses the business concerns of the Village in general, "With respect to our Village, the failure to nurture and reinforce the business environment -- in some instances, solely for political expediency -- has caused a decline in the assessed value of our commercial property." He adds, "This in turn has lowered commerce's share of the Village and school district budgets from 41 percent to 31 percent over a 10-year period, causing a corresponding increase over the same period in resident taxes of 100 percent (because the commercial rates are higher)."

His statements in this piece recall images of empty storefronts depicted on a flier from February 1997 declaring "The Time to Act is Now," which was distributed by the Chamber of Commerce, and created tremendous conflict as letters to the editor poured into the local papers arguing whether or not it was appropriate to depict the Village as a ghost town. He writes, "We've been trying to lift the Village out of economic decline." He adds, "As a commercial real estate broker, I encounter the hesitation about opening a business here almost daily. The brokerage community, representing the kind of national tenants we need, advises their clients that -- though the demographics are good -- the area just doesn't seem to be able to get it together."

In 1997 the Chamber flier states underneath the photo of the empty stores, "Take a look at the photo above. Is that a sign of an economically healthy village? Or does it show a village sliding down the same kind of slippery slope as so many other villages in Nassau? It is a photo that we were not pleased to have taken in our Village. But it does serve as a brutally stark example of the realities we all need to face and of how badly Franklin Avenue is in need of revitalization."

The Chamber recommended a streetscape beautification plan, the acquisition of houses for parking, and the creation of a Business Improvement District (BID). They argued, "Each of these proposals is inextricably linked to the other to create the synergy and dynamism needed to revitalize our Village and restore its pre-eminence as an upscale suburban community." They added, "The alternative, of course, is to do nothing or to be ineffective by doing only one or two of the recommendations and see our Village continue to wither away."

Donley now writes, "The Chamber's advocacy of the long-standing Village Parking and Park Buffer Strip Plan has always been in the best interest of the entire Village. It has been truly detrimental that the residents of this community were so misled as to have negated the recommendation by the Business Planning Coalition." He adds, "The block between 9th and 10th Street on the west side of Franklin Avenue cannot attract retail tenants as long as the all-day parkers from the office building on the next block are taking the parking spaces. This we can fix, but the politics of paralysis makes progress difficult."

While the Chamber cites the Majority Report of the Business Plannng Coalition, it discounts the Minority Report and the considerable numbers of residents in the Village who have spoken out in Village Hall and in letters to the editor. While the Majority Report calls for the implementation of the Buffer Plan, the Minority Report states that its authors believe this section of the Majority Report is in some cases "inaccurate" and "does not offer solutions to problems in our business district that are compatible with the primary residential quality of the Village."

The Minority Report argues, "Today there are many creative solutions to supplying adequate parking in commercial areas. Concepts that are environmentally friendly and do not concrete over every inch of green space. The Coalition members chose not to explore these other options, but preferred to stick with an antiquated plan adopted by the Village back in 1969 and supported in their report by data that only gives some of the history of the Parking Buffer Strip Plan. This plan, for all practical purposes, was abandoned by the Village from 1979 on."

The Minority members, Village Trustee Judith A. Asselta, CPOA Representative Gary Bencivenga, and Seventh Street Merchants Representative Mary Zimmer, went on to write, "It is difficult to endorse a report that puts such an unbalanced emphasis on parking or the hypothetical lack of it as the root of all our problems and the increasing of the parking supply as the cure for all ills. One has only to think of the EAB building in Uniondale, where they have to put ropes out in the parking lot in winter so that people can hold on to them to prevent them from being blown away as they cross the great expanse of parking to the building. Yet, this has not proven an obstacle to leasing."

The subject of parking concludes in the Minority Report with a quote from James Howard Kunstler's article Home From Nowhere which appeared in the September 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on pages 55-56. Kunstler states with regard to vehicles that they "are permitted, but they do not take precedence over human needs, including aesthetic needs."

One point raised by several residents outside Village Hall after the last Village Board meeting at which the subject of the Plan arose, was the suggestion that perhaps the Chamber of Commerce and Business Planning Coalition positions were not 100 percent objective. The Albanese Development Corporation has been pursuing lawsuits against the Village to compel Garden City to purchase a home the Albanese own to be converted into parking for the lot behind a major Albanese building. Russell Matthews, who frequently acts as the spokesperson for the Albanese Development Corporation on the subject, was a member of the Business Planning Coalition and a co-author of the Majority Report. Matthews is currently a director of the Chamber of Commerce.

In response to this accusation, it has been noted that the Chamber of Commerce has a long standing history of supporting the Plan and that the other members of the Coalition who voted in support of the majority Report [which had 10 out of 16 members vote for it, three against who drafted the Minority Report, and three who abstained] voted independently of their fellow Coalition member's business interests in the Plan.

The issue of parking is now in the hands of the Planning Commission which has embarked on an extensive study of the parking situation in the lots behind the businesses along central Franklin Avenue. The Commission is empowered to hire a consultant if they deem it necessary and were given as much time as necessary to complete the study. Certainly their recommendations, whatever they may be, will touch upon this issue, which has come to be known as houses for parking. As the Village awaits the results of this study, certainly the subject will continue to be discussed and debated.