Developing full-service to the part-time LIRR station at Belmont Park is a central focus for the property’s proposed $1.18 billion arena and retail project. (Photo by Judy Walker)
Belmont Park arena project to be delayed
Artist renderings of the proposed arena project at Belmont Park. (Courtesy of NHL.com)
Construction of the proposed arena project at Belmont Park will not start this spring as developers had hoped, though state officials insist the project remains on schedule.
Officials from Empire State Development said they are still hopeful that they can issue the final environmental impact statement on the project by the end of June, however, even if they keep to that timeline, no construction could begin until sometime in the summer at the earliest.
ESD will also ask the arena developers to contribute an additional $1.2 million to pay for an extended environmental review of the project. The ESD board voted Thursday to extend the contract of the environmental review firm AKRF for one year, through Sept. 2020.
New York Arena Partners, the developers that pitched the $1.18 billion project, had hoped to break ground by May to ensure that the New York Islanders could begin playing at the arena by the beginning of the 2021 hockey season.
The development group is comprised of the Oak View Group, Sterling Equities and Scott Malkin Group. Malkin is also a partner in the majority ownership of the Islanders.
Click to enlarge: ESD’s timeline indicated that construction of the Belmont arena project would start in Q2 2019, however that’s no longer likely.
“There will be no shovels in the ground in the first half of this year,” said Tammie Williams, community organizer with the Belmont Park Community Coalition, a group that has opposed the project.
Rachel Shatz, ESD’s vice president of planning and environmental review, said Thursday that an enormous amount of comments have already been received on the arena plan, which has made the task of putting together the final environmental impact statement that much more difficult.
“I think this process has had quite an additional amount of public outreach than our typical ones, so I think this one probably could set a record for the number of comments that we’ve received, but that is the process working,” Shatz said, according to a transcript of the meeting provided by ESD.
More than 2,000 letters in opposition of the project have been submitted to ESD officials so far, according to Williams.
The developers propose to bring a 19,000-seat arena, 250-room hotel and 435,000-square-foot retail village to 43 acres of the horse racing track’s parking lots.
Elected officials have said that creating full-time train service to Belmont’s Long Island Rail Road station should be a prerequisite to building the arena development.
The Nassau County Village Officials Association recently passed a resolution that any approval of the Belmont project must be conditioned on the requirement of a full-time station at Belmont and that the “developer be required to bear and pay all costs associated with the upgrade of the station, without the expenditure of public resources (tax revenue, bond proceeds or otherwise) to rebuild said station.”
Officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said they are exploring options for expanding service to Belmont, while estimating that full-time service would cost at least $300 million.
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