At a Wednesday, May 23, meeting of the Nassau County Planning Commission, commissioners made a motion, which was then adopted, recommending that the Town of Oyster Bay board disapprove the application submitted by the Taubman Company to build a mall on the Cerro Wire site in Syosset.

The planning commission makes recommendations on zoning applications once the municipality, in this case the Town of Oyster Bay, reaches the stage of its review of an application when it has made its environmental determination. That triggers the referral to the Nassau County Planning Commission.

When the Town of Oyster Bay board adopted the environmental findings on May 8, the file materials from the town were sent to the planning commission in order for them to vote on a recommendation. Their statutory authority gives them the options of recommending approval, disapproval or modification.

One of the commission's staff members analyzed the materials sent from the Town of Oyster Bay board and made a brief presentation to the planning commission by reading certain portions of the information he reviewed. The staff then recommended to the commission that they recommend disapproval and that is precisely what happened.

"We are quite pleased with the decision," said Howard Avrutine, co-council to the Birchwood Civic Association which has been the biggest adversary to this issue. "We feel that the commission did the right thing in reviewing what the town had sent them. We believe that they correctly recognized that this application would be a detriment to the community."

This vote is significant in that, now, in order for the town board to approve this application when they vote, they would need a super majority, which is a majority plus one. If the planning commission had recommended approval, then a simple majority would have been sufficient. In order to approve the application, the town now needs five of seven board members to vote yes. If the town overrides the recommendation and accepts the application, they must include in their findings why they disapprove the planning commissions' recommendation.

"We were disappointed by the vote of the Nassau County Planning Commission, but it was fully expected," said Morton Weber, attorney representing the Taubman Company. "We will continue with the process and it will eventually resolve itself in court. If the town does deny the application, our next step will be multiple litigation."

Weber's law firm will be handling the local litigation and, according to Weber, Taubman also has a national law firm, independent of Weber. The name of that law firm has not yet been released.

"Article 78 is an action that we are going to be bringing against the town claiming that they certainly are arbitrary and capricious in denying the application and that they performed an illegal act in that they did not consider the 750,000 square foot plan that was formally submitted," said Weber.

Once the Town of Oyster Bay receives the official documents from the Nassau County Planning Commission, they will be able to render a decision and vote on the application. Depending on how fast the paper work is moved along, the vote could be set for the June 12 board meeting, according to a town of Oyster Bay spokesperson.