I know concerns have circulated the community about St. Francis Hospital’s plans for future expansion and acquisition of properties on Oaktree Lane. I reached out to the President of the hospital recently asking for an update on their plans and wanted to share his response with you (below).
If we are made aware of any further actions by the hospital, I will inform you all.
Very truly yours,
Mayor Brian Herrington
St. Francis Hospital, The Heart Center®
Catholic Health Services
At the heart of health
July 28, 2020
Dear Mayor Herrington,
Thank you for your recent letter and for your kind words regarding St. Francis Hospital’s efforts in battling the COVID-19 pandemic. St. Francis Hospital is a nationally respected medical facility that is known for overall excellence and an unwavering commitment to delivering the highest level of medical care to the community. We are happy to serve Long Islanders. While we beat back the first wave of this often deadly virus, we remain vigilant should it reemerge. Our continued goal is to provide first-class quality care to all who need it.
I understand from your letter that Village residents have questions concerning the hospital’s future plans. As you know, St. Francis Hospital is located in a fully developed area, which has limited our ability to expand to meet the increasing need for enhanced services. As we consider how to best serve Long Islanders in the future, we must study ways to grow to continue delivering the superior medical care that our patients and their families expect. We have explored purchasing adjacent property, as any responsible organization in similar circumstances would do.
As we were contemplating how best to respond to our community’s needs, 90 Oaktree Lane located on the northern border of the St, Francis Hospital campus and at the Southwest comer of Oaktree Lane and Port Washington Boulevard was publicly listed for sale. In August of 2019, an agent for St. Francis Hospital was able to acquire the property. A few months later, an agent for the hospital was able to acquire 39 Oaktree Lane, which is currently being used as housing for religious sisters who are employed and work at St Francis Hospital. These two properties are the only ones that have been obtained to date.
The two acquisitions on Oaktree Lane allowed us to consider the possibility of other options that would enable the hospital to better serve the residents of Flower Hill and the broader community. In December, we made fair and generous offers to eight other property owners on Oaktree Lane. Although these proposals have expired, many of those property owners have expressed continued interest in possibly selling their properties. While St. Francis remains open to purchasing these Oaktree Lane properties, we have to reassess financial considerations in a post-COVID-19 world.
We will continue to explore options, but still have much more work to do before presenting any projects to either the community or the Village of Flower Hill. When appropriate, we would be happy to have further discussions with stakeholders in the community.
Thank you for reaching out to me and for your continuing service to the Village of Flower Hill.
Sincerely,
Charles L. Lucore, MD, MBA
President
A Member of Catholic Health Services of Long Island
Founded by the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary
100 Port Washington Boulevard, Roslyn, New York 11576-1348 Telephone: 516/562-6000
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Governor Cuomo cancelled March 18 Village Elections due to the pandemic and has authorized all New York State Village to hold their local elections on September 15.
To promote safe elections, anyone may request an absentee ballot if the reason for not voting in person is to avoid infection by the Corona virus. You can get an absentee ballot application by clicking on the Village Forms Tab, scroll down to Miscellaneous Permits and print out the second document, “Application for an Absentee Ballot”.
Submit the original signed application to the Village and we will mail you an absentee ballot until September 9. After September 9, you may submit the application in person at Village Hall and we will hand you an absentee ballot to be filled out and returned or completed at Village Hall.
If you are planning to vote in person, election hours are noon to 9 pm. This year we will be conducting the election in the Village Hall Garage, adjacent to the parking lot. The will enable us to keep all the garage doors open for greater air circulation and allow us to maintain appropriate distancing measures. Plenty of hand sanitizer will be available and each voter will receive a personal pen.
If you have any questions please call us at Village Hall.
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I wanted to provide status of Altice’s efforts to restore services to Long Island communities. Altice has teams deployed around the clock in your communities to restore services as quickly as possible. We have made significant progress in restoring services, with the percentage of customers on Long Island without service due to the storm falling from more than 33% immediately following the storm to less than 4% today. However we will continue working diligently to ensure all our customers have their services restored, and I will do my best to provide more granular information on the status of customers in individual communities as soon as possible.
Below is additional information for you to share with your constituents relating to our services. Specifically, below are: 1) Trouble Shooting Tips for customers on Service Restoration, 2) Ways for Customers to Contact Us to Report Service Issues, and 3) Information on how to Request Credits.
Service Restoration: Trouble Shooting Tips
Once power has been restored to your home, your Optimum services should be back up and running. If you experienced a loss of power, it is best to restart your equipment using the following steps:
Unplug your equipment from its power source.
Wait 30 seconds.
Plug your equipment back into the power source.
If your service does not return after restarting, it is possible that:
The power that feeds our network in your area comes from a different commercial power source than the power that feeds your home or business location or there is another issue relating to network power that needs to be addressed. We are coordinating with the electric companies to identify these issues and ensure prioritization of repair or restoration.
There is damage to the Optimum network, like a downed utility pole or wire break, and our crews are proactively working to rectify this type of damage to restore service.
We have created the opportunity for customers check on service status online by doing the following:
Go tooptimum.net/support/outage and sign in with Optimum ID and password. Next, under Support, located in the upper right corner, click “Service status”
Report Service Issues:
If you are experiencing a service issue, we have created four channels for you to advise us of your issue. Contacting Optimum via any of these channels will result in a trouble ticket being created that will direct a repair team to assess and address the issue:
Daniel Eichorn , P.E. President & CEO, PSEG Long Island Uniondale, NY
Dear Mr. Eichorn
I am writing to you today to express my Village’s displeasure and frustration with PSEG’s response to Tropical Storm Isaias regarding power restoration and ongoing communications failures. Currently, over half of the Village of Flower Hill is without power and estimates for restoration continue to change and be pushed back. Many residents are exasperated as this is the same experience they had after Super Storm Sandy.
The number one issue is that we need crews in our community now. It has been forty-eight hours since the storm and residents have not seen PSEG restoration personnel in the community. These PSEG customers have been abandoned. The only PSEG personnel I have spoken with in person has been assigned to keep an eye on a two day old live wire. They repeatedly tell me someone is supposed to be dispatched to turn it off at the end of their shift and then that does not happen. This is unacceptable from a safety and communications perspective.
Flower Hill is currently being under reported for the number of outages because of the communications failure during the storm. For more than twenty-four hours residents could not report outages and became so frustrated they gave up. There are entire blocks of Flower Hill you have listed as having power that do not actually have power. This is misleading and I believe impacting your response to our
community unfairly.
The communication failure has not stopped there, our residents who were able to report outages, cannot get an accurate restoration time estimate through any PSEG platform. Multiple residents have shared with me that they are getting conflicting restoration times from the telephone, text, app, and online map resources. This is continuing to increase frustration and despair in the Village.
I understand that these are challenging times but as a public serv}ce provider these issues must be addressed immediately. Due to COVID-19 customers cannot even go to a neighbor or family members home with power for shelter or support. We knew this storm was coming and you assured us multiple
times that PSEG was prepared but this is clearly not the case. Please provide assistance and address these communications failures immediately.
Brian Herrington Mayor
Village of Flower Hill
CC:
NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo NYS Senator Anna Kaplan
NYS Assemblyman Anthony D’Urso NYS Public Service Commission
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We Village Mayors are contacting you collectively representing various parts of Manhasset, Port Washington, and Roslyn to demand immediate deployment of additional resources into our communities. Our residents and our teams have patiently tried to work cooperatively with little to no operational support. Our communities continue to manage serious public health situations presented by downed lines, COVID-19, and residents now not having power for six days. The continued delaying of restoration times and lack or operational support is unacceptable.
Despite all of the failures throughout the PSEG system of operations and communications, the people of PSEG, like our municipal representative team, led by Kim Kaiman, and our crews on the ground are operating professionally under the harshest conditions including systematic failure. While billions of dollars have spent to improve the system since Superstorm Sandy, we can tell you this region is experiencing the same failures.
While we are aware that crews have been called in from out of state, there are clearly not enough boots on the ground. Residents could have instituted evacuation plans days ago but instead they, and our teams, were repeatedly told restoration times would be within 24-48 hours of each passing day. This is all compounded by COVID-19 and the desire for our residents to not put themselves in harm’s way.
Our Villages have cleared the roads and done all the things we needed to do to assist LIPA and PSEG with recovery but we are not seeing the same support from your operational teams. The frontline workers are doing their best to get the job done but it is clear to us that more help is needed to immediately address the safety and electrical restoration needs of our communities and all of Long Island.
We look forward to an expeditious response to our concerns and are willing to discuss them immediately at your convenience. Given this is the beginning of hurricane season we cannot let this experience be repeated.
Sincerely,
Ed Adler, Mayor-Village of Sands Point
Jim Avena, Mayor-Village of Manorhaven
Lawrence Ceriello-Village of Munsey Park
Barbara Donno, Mayor-Village of Plandome Manor
Nora Haagenson, Mayor-Village of Baxter Estates
Brian Herrington, Mayor-Village of Flower Hill
Thomas Minutillo, Mayor-Village of Plandome
Kenneth Riscica, Mayor-Village of Plandome Heights
Bob Weitzner, Mayor-Village of Port Washington North
cc:
The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo, New York State Governor
The Honorable Ralph Suozzi, Chairman Long Island Power Authority
The Honorable John B. Rhodes, Chairman-Public Service Commission
The Honorable Anna Kaplan, New York State Senator
The Honorable Anthony D’Urso, New York State Assemblyman
The Honorable Laura Curran, Nassau County Executive
The Honorable Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, Nassau County Legislator
The Honorable Judi Bosworth, Town of North Hempstead Supervisor
The Honorable Mariann Dalimonte, Town of North Hempstead Councilwoman
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Please help us determine how our government can better prepare for a disaster by taking this survey.
The Nassau County Hazard Mitigation survey is 31 questions long and should take no more than 15 minutes to complete. You will be asked about hazards that concern you, your experiences with disasters, and how you think Nassau County should respond to future disasters. Your feedback will make Nassau County more prepared!
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Comments: Comments Off on Village Announces Special Board Meeting 6/18/20 to Consider Permitting Outdoor Dining at Restaurants
Today our community can enter NYS Phase 1 reopening and Flower Hill is ready to assist our residents and business owners. Under the Phase 1 reopening construction, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, curbside/inside retail pick up, manufacturing, and wholesale trade can reopen under certain conditions. Our Village is prepared to help you RESTART and the team has prepared a resource page on our website to help you understand the reopening plan and provide additional resources. Call our team at 516-627-5000 or email INFO@VillageFlowerHill.org for assistance.
Please remember that this reopening does not mean the Coronavirus threat is over. The public still needs to continue to follow face mask requirements, social distancing, and other safety protocols.
BUSINESS REOPENING RESOURCES
Flower Hill Construction Phase I Resources Page: (LINK)
We hope all of you are well, and that you remain so as we
continue through this crisis.
As we are sure you are aware, the Governor has issued a
series of Executive Orders restricting the workforce that is permitted at any
work site.
New guidelines have been issued pertaining to construction
work. While these guidelines have not been put in place by our Board, we wanted
to make you aware of them to make sure any difficulties can be avoided.
For the purposes of our Village, under these guidelines
if construction work is being conducted on your property it must be halted
unless it fits in one of the following categories: (1) the
construction is essential because it involves a project necessary to protect
health and safety of the occupant; (2) a certain portion of work at the site
must be completed before closing the site because it would be unsafe to
close the site otherwise, or (3) the work is being conducted by a single
worker, who is the sole employee/worker on the job site.
Please take steps to halt projects as required unless
they fit within one of the three categories listed. Failure to cooperate
with the Governor’s Order could result in violations being issued with
potential fines of up to $10,000.00 by New York State.
Should you have any questions regarding the Executive
Orders of the Governor, a suggested website for frequently asked questions is HTTPS://ESD.NY.GOV/SITES/DEFAULT/FILES/ESD
ESSENTIAL EMPLOYERFAQ 032220.PDF
Thank you for your cooperation.
Peter Albinski
Building Superintendent
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