One of Farmingdale’s greatest resources for outdoor athletics is about to get even grander, as Town of Oyster Bay officials have broken ground on a project that will turn the former Liberty Industrial Finishing site into a recreation and sports complex, which will act as an expansion to Allen Park. At an onsite press conference held last week, Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said that plans for the project began as soon as the former superfund site, located to the right of Allen Park on Motor Avenue, was declared 100 percent clean.
“This former superfund site has been the subject of great debate for decades, and thanks to the efforts of our dedicated officials, as well as others on the town board at the time, [the site] was remediated to recreational standards a few years ago,” said Saladino. “So this property is now ready for the next chapter, and we’re here to announce that we have fabulous plans for this property that will make everyone in the Farmingdale community and the Town of Oyster Bay, very happy. What was once a national priority to the Environmental Protection Agency, will soon be a community recreation and sports complex for our children and for our residents.”
Additions to the park will include the construction of softball, baseball and tee ball fields; a multipurpose field for sports teams; a pedestrian bicycle path for running, cycling and other kinds of exercise; restroom facilities; and a parking area. Saladino predicted that the expansion will result in “one of the most beautiful of the town’s facilities.”
“The Town of Oyster Bay’s parks and facilities are rated in the top 10 parks in the United States of America. We’re going to keep that tradition going,” Saladino said, adding that the project should take a little more than a year to complete. “When the development is complete, Allen Park will more than double in size and will be the pride of our community.”
“Being a sports mom and a sports grandma, the cry is out there all the time for needed fields and to do whatever we can to provide places for our young people to be,” added Nassau County Legislator Rose Marie Walker, who, along with Nassau County Legislator James Kennedy, committed $150,000 in community revitalization funding to the project. “[It’s a] very different time. When we grew up, you could just go to the field by yourself, play ball, you’d be gone for hours and nobody worried about it. Today, everything is very structured. There are teams all over the place and they’re dying for fields. This is just a way that we can help.”
In terms of the project’s cost, Saladino offered an estimate of between $8-9 million. He added that the town is using its own in-house construction crew in order to ease the burden on taxpayers, and is working towards securing grants from both the state and federal governments.
“As always, we have the normal process so that we meet all conditions of law, dot every ‘i,’ cross every ‘t,’ so that we’re doing it with 100 percent ethics and ensuring that our town attorneys are making sure that these agreements are boiler plate, to protect our taxpayers,” Saladino said. “Thus far, grants from Nassau County—the first wave of grants—are underway, and we’re in the process now of securing grants from the state and the federal government.”
The plot of land in question became a superfund site due to several years’ worth of disposals of hazardous substances from private operators at the Liberty Aircraft Products Company, dating back to the 1940s. By the late 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to actively monitor the site and vie for an optimal remediation plan. In a press release, the town detailed the subsequent efforts as having “resulted in removal of all industrial and commercial activity from the site; the demolition and removal of all structures; the construction and operation of a water remediation system; and the removal of tens of thousands of cubic yards of soil from the premises.”
“It’s really exciting to see this project start to begin,” Walker said. “We’ve worked hard on this property for a long time and now it’s ready to go forward and provide fields for our children, a nice walking path and park for people of every age.”
Saladino, who repeatedly thanked the town board for its efforts, summed up the project by calling it, “phase one of, once again, our administration making a huge commitment to our taxpayers, following through and providing some of the best facilities. This site really was a story from rags to riches. There were many environmental problems—that’s been cleaned up. And now we’re connecting the dots to turn this plight into something extraordinary.”
