My wife and I are 80-year (!) residents of Plainview (full disclosure: that’s 40 for me, plus 40 for her); and we tried to attend the eight-hour Town of Oyster Bay hearing about the proposed Country Pointe Plainview development. That’s “tried” because there was so much traffic trying to get into the Matlin Middle School parking lot that we were turned away.
But that’s the kind of thing that worries us about the after-effects if this development is built — because “If you build it, they will come.” We’re afraid that the addition of 890 families (along with their 1,000 to 2,000 cars) will produce similar traffic problems for our roads, and already-overcrowded parking lots in front of the Morton Village, Fairway, and Town Bagel shopping centers, plus the Plainview-Old Bethpage Public Library. The builder’s president, Michael Dubb, has acknowledged the inevitable traffic increase but has assured the Town that his Beechwood Organization would pay for “mitigation measures.”
However, “mitigation” means “alleviating, relieving, lessening the severity of, and making more bearable” a negative condition — and, unfortunately, no amount of money can make all the additional traffic “go away.”
But that’s not my only objection to Country Pointe. On a less serious note, I also “object” to the pretentious letter “E” appended to the end of the perfectly-good word “point.”
For one thing, Plainview people are not all French; nor are most of us ballet dancers. Most of us probably could never do “pointe ballet dancing performed on the tips of one’s toes.” (Although, if we could, would we get a 50 percent discount off the price of our new Country PointE home?)
My final “objection” is that the six-page color brochure promoting Country Pointe Plainview tells us that “Beechwood recently ranked 58th on Professional Builder Magazine’s “Giants Listing of the Top 400 Builders in the U.S.” and 87th on the Builder Magazine “Builder 100” list. As a proud Plainview-ite I ask: “Doesn’t Plainview at least deserve a “Top 10” builder?”
Richard Siegelman, Plainview
