An Early Fourth of July at Mamaroneck Board Meeting

Fireworks came a bit early for the season and the evening’s dialogue at Monday's board meeting hinted that the rockets’ red glare will likely last well beyond Independence Day.

After the board got down to business after a reception honoring former village engineer Keith Furey, some items became bogged down in procedure and several community members delivered impassioned pleas on behalf of controversial local issues.

The most wide-ranging matter before the board centered on amending a local law to remove the provision for taking into account “Cumulative Substantial Improvement” damage and repair work when it comes to calculating flood damage and making it more difficult to reach the threshold for requiring owners to raise buildings above the flood plain.

The law would eliminate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) guidelines requiring elevation of a structure if a restoration project’s cost exceeds 50 percent of the unit’s market value before the flood-related damage occurred, a total calculated cumulatively over a ten-year period. The new statute would only require complicated engineering processes if any one incident caused damage equal to or greater than half of the home’s worth.

It also eliminates the clause including, “flood damages sustained by a structure on two separate occasions during a ten-year period for which the cost of repairs at the time of such flood event, on the average, equals or exceeds 25 percent of the market value of the structure before the damage occurred.”

Mayor Norman Rosenblum criticized the misinformation floating around and agreed to continue the consideration and ensure its consistency with the Harbor Coastal Zone Management (HCZM) plan.

Decrying the current law’s broad definition of damage, he argued that over a decade homeowners perform a good deal of maintenance, all of which can be calculated into the 50 percent threshold. The only items that should be considered in the calculation are issues raised by the building inspector.

Trustee John Hofstetter and the mayor sniped over the matter of scheduling a new board meeting on August 27 to tackle the issue after the HCZM considers it.

Hofstetter said that he might not be able to make it, but Rosenblum said that despite his absence, the board would still be able to conduct business. During the ensuing argument, the mayor repeated the phrase “you’re not recognized, John, stop talking” around a half-dozen times.

Hofstetter claimed that the flooding issue is something of a “hot potato” as developers want to move into the western Mamaroneck Avenue corridor. “We’re softening development laws to make it easier to develop in a flood prone area,” he said, calling it a safety issue.

Calling the  an “island in a storm” during , he said that the board was encouraging even more irresponsible projects on a larger scale. “I think it’s wrong; we shouldn’t be making it easier for people to do that, we should be making it more difficult to do that.”

The complicated issue is only going to get more heated. Resident Sue McCrory said that one property in the village had sustained $3.2 million in damages over the last decade.

“Why would we not want to get that property out of the flood zone," she said, decrying the “dialing back of our flood protections.”

She also noted that property values fluctuate. If a prior owner put $400K of improvements into a $1 million home located in the flood zone and the market value dropped to $800K, for example, the homeowner couldn’t do any improvements even if the home never suffered flood damage unless he or she elevated the house. The law should focus on properties with repeat losses that actually sustained flood-related damage.

The board acknowledged controversies roiling the Town of Mamaroneck and conceded that the that the forthcoming tax reassessment will be a sensitive undertaking.

When matters moved to Pine Street, things took a strange turn. Three nearby residents who had sued the village, claiming that drainage work along Beach Avenue and Pine Street endangers an , confronted the board for allegedly seeking to evict them from their homes.

Village Manager Richard Slingerland replied that he had received a complaint from the contractors about people hanging around the work site, taking photos and questioning the laborers. The village requested an order of protection for safety reasons that at first called for Stuart Tiekert, Charles Morelli and Nora Lucas to stay 500 feet away from the job, an area that includes their homes. The village amended the parameter to 100 feet, but Lucas said, “That’s my front yard.”

Rosenblum rarely wields the gavel, but did during this debate. Slingerland accused the residents of “twisting the facts around.”

Scheduled for completion in September, the Pine Street project will be closely watched by neighbors to ensure that the drainage issues for nearby homes is resolved and the Tompkins Farm Oak survives.