Car dealership plan zooms past Freeport apartment development proposal

Plans to replace the vacant Meadowbrook Bank building in Freeport with a Lexus car dealership are expected to proceed with local approval even after the Nassau County Planning Commission voted to reject them, Long Island Business News reported. The Huntington-based DiNoto Group had planned to spend $60 million to build 250 rental apartments and 15,000-square-feet of retail on the four-acre site. The village terminated a deal with DiNoto in order to sell the site for $6.3 million to the Atlantic Auto Group. The change sparked a legal fight. County officials have tried to block plans for the dealership because they believed transit-oriented housing would be a better fit for a site close to Freeport’s Long Island Rail Road station. Freeport Village Attorney Howard Colton told LIBN that local approval supersedes that of the county. The property at 70 West Sunrise Highway includes the six-story former bank building, which has been empty since the 1980s. Freeport bought the property for $690,000 in 1991 and planned to redevelop it until those plans stalled. New York-based developer Time Equities had a contract with the town to turn offices in the Art Deco bank building, built in 1929, into apartments, but village officials terminated it, sparking a lawsuit. In 2015, plans to transform the property into a Marriott-branded hotel also amounted to nothing. While Freeport’s legal dispute with DiNoto is ongoing, a judge in the case has allowed the site’s redevelopment to proceed. The Freeport Village Zoning Board of Appeals recently voted to raze the bank building ahead of its sale to Atlantic Auto. [LIBN]