Opinion:VOTE ‘NO’: ‘Mega-medical center’ would destroy our community

On March 20, Lawrence School District 15 residents will be asked if the Number Six School in Woodmere should be sold to Simone Healthcare Development. Unlike most elections, in which the outcome can be reversed in two or four years, the results of this referendum could damage our community forever.

The first point to understand is what the community is actually voting for. The referendum is for a sale, free and clear, to a developer of mega-medical centers, who is then free to maximize the value of that property. There are no restrictions on the number of doctors, the hours of operation or the size and height of the facility.

Voters should base their decision on the reasonable expectation that Simone will do everything it can to maximize profits by maximizing the number of patients. That is Simone’s right, but it is at direct odds with the interests of this community. Their full page color ads with architectural renderings and flowery descriptions (which keep changing) are meaningless, because the developer is in no way bound by them.

So how busy will this mega-clinic and urgent care center be? Let’s say the clinic has one hundred physicians, though this 6.7 acre property could incorporate several times that. If each physician treats five patients an hour, that’s 500 patients an hour. Fourteen hours a day would make 7,000 patients a day!

You don’t have to be a traffic engineer to see that 7,000 additional vehicles - plus employees, delivery trucks, laboratory pick-ups, service teams and salesmen – would create gridlock on Peninsula and Branch Boulevards and on Rockaway Turnpike. And these vehicles would seek alternate routes, spilling onto residential streets, endangering our children.

Importantly, this will be a large, regional clinic, drawing patients from all over. We will have thousands of strangers in our community, every day, from early in the morning until late at night – patients, employees, service workers – on our streets and around our schools.

This is the wrong location for a mega-medical center. It is the height of