Nearly every major project or development proposed or completed on Long Island over the past forty years contains the fingerprints of Terri Elkowitz. As senior principal at VHB, Elkowitz is charged with developing strategies to address issues that need to be evaluated during an environmental impact study—and then crafting the creative solutions into presentations that can be understood by everyone from civil engineers to a mob of protesters chanting “NIMBY” at municipal board meetings. This requires a comprehensive understanding of so many elements that go into major developments, like the proposed Sands Integrated Resort or the Ronkonkoma Hub. These projects require in-depth knowledge of disciplines including, but not limited to: traffic and transportation, water supply, sewage, soil, ecology, land use, zoning, community character, air quality, noise, aesthetics, and public health.
Take the Sands project, for example, which was the most extensive traffic study that VHB has ever done for a proposed development on Long Island. Coupled with the other elements that go into a project of this stature, Elkowitz’s job was to lead her team in taking all that technical information and putting it into an environmental impact statement. In this case, the statement was 15 volumes and more than 29,000 pages, completed in a form that was readable by not only the public officials and the other public employees who are responsible for making recommendations and ultimate decisions, but also for the public who come with their own concerns and questions.
SEQR and Ye Shall Find
Elkowitz was able to develop this expertise by working to become one of the foremost experts in the SEQR process. The State Environmental Quality Review Act, which requires that all local, regional, and state government agencies examine the environmental impacts and balance them with the social and economic considerations for a certain project, or action, during their discretionary review, was adopted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in the late 1970s but only heavily implemented in the early ‘80s.
“I entered this field when SEQR was in its infancy, so I grew with the SEQR process,” Elkowitz told *Road Warriors*. “I worked very hard to become someone who understood that process inside and out, and that has been the expertise that I have brought professionally to all the projects that I have worked on. Environment is very broadly defined—traffic, air, noise, community services, community character, zoning—so by default, while you’re not an expert in all these things, you certainly have to understand their interrelationship and how they affect projects.”
Elkowitz cut her teeth in this business working on the redevelopment of Roosevelt Raceway, shortly after graduate school studying policy analysis and public management. This project in the heart of Hempstead is a mixed-use project of retail, hospitality, and residential. Elkowitz’s understanding of SEQR was not only instrumental in helping get that project across the finish line, but it drew the attention of the other principals on the job, who encouraged her to step out and start her own firm.
“My job has not been easy,” she said. “I joke with my husband that although we’re married 40 years, we only get credit for 20 because all the years I’ve been out in public hearings and whatever,” she laughs. “But he has been an incredible supporter of everything I’ve ever done.”
Elkowitz began her own environmental planning firm in 1988 and ran it for 21 years on Long Island until the entire firm merged with VHB in 2009. “That allowed me and the people in my firm to actually get a taste of some other disciplines in-house and be able to serve our clients even better and more efficiently,” Elkowitz says. “We were no longer just able to provide environmental planning services, we also were able to offer civil engineering and transportation in an integrated way, which has allowed us to grow and effectively provide broad services to our clients.”
The State of the Union(dale)
Elkowitz’s professional path has led her not once, not twice, but three times to Uniondale, where a Marriott hotel stands next to the Nassau County Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the hopes and dreams of planners past and present.
“I worked on the expansion of the Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, which was done many years ago. I also worked for Charles Wang and the Lighthouse Development Group in the early 2000s when they were proposing the Lighthouse project. We worked for RXR when they were proposing the hub innovation district at the Coliseum, so I’ve been involved in the Coliseum for a long time,” she said.
The current proposal, the Sands Integrated Resort, includes a casino, hotel, restaurants, and entertainment space. It’s a substantial undertaking that will require New York State to award a downstate casino license to the property, in an atmosphere of fierce competition. To win this bid, Sands has pulled out all the stops to ensure their proposal is as comprehensive and amenable to the community as possible. To do so, they need to ensure that they are thoughtful and responsive to the input of the community (including the business and non-profit communities). Elkowitz’s team has been charged with a major piece of that: the voluminous environmental impact statement.
VHB‘s traffic team on Long Island did a comprehensive traffic impact study that includes hundreds of intersections and ramps along the Meadowbrook State Parkway. “We looked at that Parkway from Northern State to Southern State,” she said. “We looked at it seasonally. We looked at it during the holiday period because of the location of Roosevelt Field Mall and other shopping areas. We looked at it in the summer because some raised concerns about beach traffic and whether the impacts during the peak beach season would be significant.”
The truth is that even if the state chooses not to award the casino to Sands, the traffic study VHB’s team has put together still stands alone to document needed infrastructure upgrades.
“If one goes back and looks at the traffic impact study that was done for the Lighthouse proposal, you will see that a lot of the issues that we are identifying now with the roadway system existed at the time we did the traffic study for the Lighthouse in the early 2000s,” Elkowitz said. “So yes, there are improvements that need to be made for the traveling public—me being one of them. I’m not a traffic engineer, but I drive during peak hours, so yes, there are traffic improvements that, absent Lighthouse, absent Sands, absent you name it, need to be addressed.”
Beyond traffic and transportation concerns, the environmental impact statement had to address water supply issues. If the Sands project is completed as proposed, there will be a need for approximately 740,000 gallons of water per day. To answer this need, Sands has outlined a proposal for the construction of a well that will provide more than 1.9 million gallons per day, which will address existing needs in the greater community as well.
Sands has consistently heard and responded to the community’s needs in a comprehensive fashion, which is not always the case.
Heart(land) Break
The Ronkonkoma Hub project, also known as Station Yards, spans more than 53 acres surrounding the Ronkonkoma Long Island Rail Road Station and consists of approximately 1,450 homes, 360,000 square feet of commercial space, 190,000 square feet of retail, and 60,000 square feet of hospitality space. It was a triumph for TriTech and all involved in the arduous process from bid to construction to completion. Elkowitz and VHB came in early in the process to see it through.
The Long Island Rail Road transports 17,000 commuters west toward Penn Station per day, making Station Yards the busiest train station in Suffolk County and the second busiest on Long Island. LIRR riders have the option of the sixty-five-minute express train from Ronkonkoma to Penn Station or East Side Access into Grand Central Station.
“It was very interesting to be a part of that process with the Town and with the developer because it became a true public-private partnership. Through a lot of collaboration and comprehensive SEQR and zoning processes, we were able to assist the Town in completing a thorough environmental review process and identifying required mitigation tied to levels of development impact that has allowed phased development over years to positively transform this area,” Elkowitz said. “It was really an honor to be involved in a project like that.”
But not every project proposal gets completed. The Heartland Town Square project would sit where the Long Island Expressway meets the Sagtikos Parkway. The hard-fought development and design were to be Long Island’s first “smart growth” community. The project included 9,000 housing units, a “lifestyle” center, 3 million square feet of Class A office space, and more, fused into a planned development designed to live, work, and play. Though we have yet to see this development come to fruition, the project and the experience have stayed close to Elkowitz’s heart.
“I’ve worked on a lot of those projects,” Elkowitz says. “Years and years of work and effort, and then you don’t see them come to fruition…”
Infrastructure challenges, including a lack of sewers, can stall a project like Heartland that has gotten approval. Even if a municipality and a developer come together and they seriously want to develop an area, there are financial realities. “You know a developer on a project can’t necessarily fund sewers for an entire area,” Elkowitz says. With funding from the recently passed Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act, perhaps we will see projects like Heartland Town Square back on the drawing board.
What we can say for sure is that if there is an exciting proposal out there for a project that needs extensive research and development for an environmental impact review, Terri Elkowitz will be close by.