Shops at Nanuet: Discussions on Public Safety

The Clarkstown Planning Board and other Clarkstown officials continued discussions with Simon Property Group, Inc. on the transformation of the Nanuet Mall into ‘The Shops at Nanuet’ at a Planning Board meeting Wednesday night at Clarkstown Town Hall.

Representatives that spoke about The Shops at Nanuet:

• Chuck Schneider, senior civil engineer for Simon
• Ira Emanuel of the Law Office of Ira M. Emanuel, P.C. in New City
• Sam Fattah, vice president of project management for Simon

Clarkstown Consultants present working on the plans with Simon are

• Jose C. Simoes- Town Planner
• James Creighton - Assistant Town Planner
• Charles Maneri - Clarkstown Building Plans Examiner
• Dennis Letson, Clarkstown - Deputy Director of Environmental Control
• Daniel Kraushaar – Deputy Town Attorney

Simon plans to change the Nanuet Mall into The Shops at Nanuet, an open air Main Street concept. “We’re trying to replicate a downtown experience … in a contained space,” said Schneider.

Read more about these changes in this detailing the October informational meeting. Read the first article on the Jan. 18 meeting , which discussed ways to fix traffic flow.

Simon presented to the Planning Board a matrix that goes through all the comments received from Clarkstown’s consultants and outside agencies such as the Nanuet Fire Department and Clarkstown Police Department.

“The good news is that we are in agreement with 99 percent of what’s in (this matrix),” said Emanuel. “The primary purpose of this document is to divide the conditions into those which can and should be met as a condition of making the final approvals granted.”

He added that many of the items discussed at TAC were minute details of the site that do not “arise to policy decisions,” such as spelling and engineering clarifications.

TAC is the Technical Advisory Committee part of the Clarkstown Planning Department that is chaired by Jose Simoes. In these meetings, TAC evaluates the technical adequacy of all applications to Town agencies concerned with planning.

“We spent quite a bit of time with the staff—Maneri, Letson, Kraushar, Simoes, Creighton. I want to thank them for all the time they put in,” said Emanuel.

After discussing traffic flow, Simon representatives moved on to other site plan issues such as public safety. He presented the board with a memo from Clarkstown PD Chief Michael Sullivan dated Jan. 18, 2012. Emanuel pulled a sentence from the memo to sum it up:

We are satisfied with the security arrangements and the emergency planning of the mall

“There is a substation that is going to be provided at the new shopping center as there is at the existing mall,” said Emanuel. “It will be up on the second floor next to Sears and the new fitness club. There will be a fiber-optic link as requested by the police department. They also requested certain equipment.”

Simon and Sullivan worked together to determine location, configuration and floor plan of the substation, which will be adjacent to the mall security office.

“We discussed it by phone before we drew it,” he said. “(Sullivan) His answer was that he loved it.”

Their next discussion is Jan. 25.

To read more details about the plans for the Shops at Nanuet, check out this four-part series from October 2011:

Check back with Patch later for more follow-up articles on this meeting.