Zone Change Poised For Oheka Residences
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Covenants and restrictions required to enact a zone change clearing the way for the Residences at Oheka, pictured in a rendering, have been filed.
Requirements to move forward a conditional zone change approval for a luxury apartment complex on the Oheka Castle property have been met.
Now that covenants and restrictions for the property were filed last week, the zone change will allow for a 190-unit complex to be built on an 18.3-acre subdivision between Oheka Castle and the Cold Spring Hills Country Club.
The town board was set to have a hearing Tuesday aimed at amending the covenants to make it clearer which Oheka Castle was responsible for meeting and which ones the Cold Spring Hills Country Club was required to meet. It would have also given both sides another two years to file the covenants because the resolution makes the covenants and restrictions new again in the eyes of the law, town officials said.
However, with the covenants filed this month, the hearing was no longer needed.
“They desire not to amend them, so they submitted them, and at this point, they’re in compliance,” Supervisor Frank Petrone said Tuesday afternoon during a town board meeting.
The covenants mandate improvements to the intersection of Jericho Turnpike and East Gate Drive, including possibly a traffic light, as well as payment for connecting the new homes to the Nassau County sewer system and any improvements to the South Huntington Water District pipe network that are needed.
James Margolin, an attorney representing the Cold Spring Hills Country Club, said Tuesday’s developments were a procedural matter.
“All we were asking for was the town board to have a hearing to give us more time to do it,” he said. “We were able to finish it and file the covenants so we didn’t have to have a hearing.’
The development would prevent the surrounding 158-acre Cold Spring Hills Country Club from being developed by stripping it of development rights.
A conditional approval for the zone change was awarded in March 2012, allowing the developers of the four-story condominium development to take advantage of the town’s open-space cluster zoning district. The district aims to encourage denser development in exchange for the preservation of a much larger piece of land. Rolling features of the surrounding terrain will obscure some of the project’s size, attorney Michael McCarthy, representing Melius in the condo project, has said.
