A plan pitched by a private marketing firm to build a $2.75 million multipurpose indoor sports training facility with a turf field in Mineola in a partnership with Portuguese soccer club FC Porto at no cost to the village has gotten the kibosh after initial talks with village officials.
At last Wednesday night’s village board of trustees meeting, Mineola Mayor Scott Strauss said the prospect of Nassau Dome Sports Complex (NDSC) LLC building the facility at field 3 at Wilson Park didn’t get past the initial round of conversations about the project between village and company officials following a promising presentation last month.
“The plan isn’t working out so well, on our end and the company’s end. So we’re taking it off the table,” Strauss said.
He said the plan looked good at first, but on further examination “didn’t turn out that well.”
“There were traffic concerns,” Strauss said in comments after the meeting. “There were also concerns over the height of the dome and the effect of that.”
The 64-foot high dome of the 78,000-square-foot facility that NDSC proposed was one indicator that the project wasn’t a good fit for Mineola.
Strauss said Regal was pushing its agenda a bit too aggressively for the Mineola village board.
“They were trying to move a lot faster than we wanted to. We wanted community involvement and they wanted to set deadlines,” Strauss said. “We couldn’t make it all happen.”
Regal’s primary mission is to create soccer academies for FC Porto in local facilities it seeks to make profitable by also leasing the field out for tournaments and other local events.
Leigh Pilkington, CEO of Regal Sporting Group, NDSC’s consulting arm, said F.C. Porto, Spanish league team Valencia and athletic shoe company New Balance as possible partners in the project. He pitched the facility as one that would give teams of the Mineola Athletic Association and the Mineola Police Athletic League first dibs for prime usage time at the sports facility.
Strauss said the village trustees are aware of Wilson Park’s significance for the community. “It’s one of our final pieces of property that we have control over,” Strauss said.
In the end, he said, Regal also lost its enthusiasm for the project. Regal’s proposal also included plans to also add a turf outdoor field on another Wilson Park field and creation of a 30-year pact with the village with a schedule of annual licensing fees that was to ultimately total $1.77 million.
“It was a mutual cooling,” Strauss said
Strauss said the cost of building turf fields put the village board off the idea two years ago. He said the cost of preparing the playing fields for the turf is the problem, since the base of the fields is landfill.
In another development, Alex D’Angelo and other Linden Road residents, including Judge Scott Fairgrieve and former trustee Linda Fairgrieve, asked the village board to restrict parking on their street from 10 a.m. to noon daily. D’Angelo said residents want the board to act on a petition they submitted 10 months ago. He said parking is presently unrestricted on half of the street, effectively inviting commuters to park there.
Strauss said the village board is awaiting results of a parking study, commissioned primarily to address parking issues around downtown Mineola, before considering changes on Linden Road.
On another resident issue, Village Clerk Joseph Scalero said senior village residents who are 65 years old or older can apply for senior citizen tax exemptions that could reduce their village taxes up to 50 percent of assessed value depending on income level. Applications are available at the village clerk’s office in Mineola Village Hall or on the village web site, www.mineola-ny.gov.
At the outset of the meeting, William Barrett, partner of Rynkar Vail & Barrett formally delivered his firm’s audit report of the 2015-16 village budget. The report noted that the village board had overspent its approved 2015-16 budget of $21.9 million by more than $1 million spent on new fire department equipment and improvements to Mineola Memorial Park.
Improvements to the park ultimately cost $2.3 million and, as the auditor’s report noted, incentive funds from developers and community development funds paid for those park improvements, including a permanent stage and pavers through the park.
Barrett extolled the board’s investment in Memorial Park and its purchase of the fire department equipment.
“Everything is great. Everything went according to plan,” Barrett said.
A copy of the audit report is posted in the Village Treasurer’s Department on the village website.
