At its Tuesday, Jan. 7 meeting, the Oyster Bay Town Board was presented with a proposal to construct a Costco store in Hicksville on the southwest corner of Charlotte Avenue and West John Street. The application requires board approval since the property's zoning must be changed from light industrial to retail before the facility can be built.

In December 2001, Costco Wholesale Corporation and Westbury Realty - which owns the property, submitted an application to the Town of Oyster Bay requesting to build a 148,666-square-foot Costco at the site of the former Jones Institute, a senior facility which closed in the late 1970s. The property runs westerly to the intersection of Cantiague Rock Road and southerly to the railroad.

In a previous article, Louis Soloway, an attorney with the East Meadow firm of Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman, representing Costco, said the site would house only the Costco store, which includes a tire center and 741 parking spaces. No other retail store would be constructed on the property.

Last year, a traffic study was conducted at the request of the town. Counts were done at the intersections of West John Street at Cantiague Rock Road, Charlotte Avenue, Newbridge Road, Broadway and Duffy Avenue as well as at Charlotte and Duffy and Charlotte and Old Country Road.

The results of the traffic study found that 566 vehicles currently travel within the immediate vicinity of the proposed site during peak weekday hours (4 to 6 p.m.) while 962 travel on Saturdays between 11:45 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. With traffic along West John Street and the surrounding streets already contributing to 58 percent of the area's traffic flow, residents living in the vicinity of the proposed site believe traffic generated by patrons traveling to and from the store will only make things worse.

"We are against it because of the traffic," said Greg Yatzyshyn, a member of the NorthWest Civic Association who spoke at the meeting.

"There is already high traffic volume on West John Street [without Costco.] Looking at these numbers, and that's without including deliveries, it is only going to increase. Even if they changed the light patterns, that's going to eliminate the number of cars. It would still be the same amount of traffic just moving faster or slower."

Yatzyshyn added, "If [the problem was] a tangible one such as the size of the building, shrubbery or parking, there would be elbow room. But traffic is traffic."

Representatives of the Jericho Gardens Civic Association also spoke at the meeting, stressing concern for the increased traffic flow a Costco would generate on residential streets, particularly if store patrons used local roads as cut-throughs. A representative from the civic association could not be reached for comment at press time.

According to Phyllis Barry, spokesperson for the town, the record on the Costco application will remain open for two weeks. "It will be closed on January 21 and the board will begin deliberations on the application," she said. "There is no set time in which the board has to conform to." During the two-week comment period, residents of Hicksville will be able to submit any questions or concerns they may have about the application for board review.