Two lines near the end of a long town board calendar are where the largest retail project in central Nassau County either moves or does not.

Resolution 610 of 2026 concerns the decision on the application of K/BTF Broadway, LLC for a Special Use Permit for Active Recreation Use at Broadway Commons Mall in Hicksville. Resolution 611 concerns the decision on the same applicant's Special Use Permit for a Motor Vehicle Fuel Sales and Service Station at the same address.

The Town of Oyster Bay Town Board meets at 10 a.m. Tuesday, August 11, at 54 Audrey Avenue.

What the project is

K/BTF Broadway, LLC is the ownership group that bought the property in 2024 for just over $40 million. What it has proposed since is a roughly $200 million redevelopment rebranded as the Shops on Broadway.

The plan takes the enclosed mall apart rather than adding to it. The former Macy's and the Mavis building come down. The roof comes off most of what remains, turning an interior corridor into an outdoor street. Green space goes in. A dining hub and an entertainment plaza are drawn into the middle of it.

The published anchor list runs Target, an expanding IKEA, Round1 Bowling and Arcade, and a new BJ's Wholesale Club. Total retail space does not grow. It shrinks, by roughly 223,000 square feet.

That last figure is the one that gets misread most often, so it is worth sitting with. This is not a project that adds a great deal of store. It is a project that removes store and adds outdoors. The bet is that a smaller amount of retail arranged around a walkable exterior earns more per square foot than a larger amount arranged around an interior corridor built in 1956, when the site opened as the Mid-Island Shopping Plaza.

Why these two permits and not the whole thing

A redevelopment of this size does not turn on a single approval. It needs site plan review, it needs parking relief, and the published plan has always acknowledged it would require multiple variances and multiple special use permits.

A special use permit is a specific instrument and it is worth being precise about what it does. Zoning tells you what a district permits as of right. A special use is a category the code contemplates as acceptable in that district but only under conditions the board sets case by case, because the impacts vary with the site. The board is not being asked whether a use is legal in the abstract. It is being asked whether this use, at this location, with these conditions attached, is acceptable.

Which is why the conditions matter more than the yes. A special use permit granted with hours-of-operation limits, lighting standards, screening requirements, and a traffic mitigation obligation is a materially different approval from the same permit granted clean.

Active Recreation Use is what covers the entertainment side of the plan. Bowling, arcade and the indoor attractions discussed publicly for the site all sit in that category rather than in ordinary retail, because they generate different traffic at different hours, they draw from a wider radius, and they concentrate people in the evening rather than spreading them across a shopping day.

Motor Vehicle Fuel Sales and Service Station is the gas pumps that come with a BJ's. Warehouse club fuel is a deliberate traffic instrument. It is priced to be a reason to make the trip, and it produces a queue. Fuel is separately permitted almost everywhere in New York for reasons that have nothing to do with shopping: underground storage tanks, vapor recovery, stormwater contact with a fueling apron, and the specific circulation problem of cars stacking at a pump island.

The part a Hicksville resident should actually care about

Broadway Commons sits on Broadway between Old Country Road and the Long Island Expressway, in the densest retail corridor in the town. The site already generates traffic. The question in front of the board is not whether the corridor is busy. It is whether the changed mix makes the existing intersections work differently.

Consider what the three pieces do to the daily pattern. A wholesale club is a high-volume, large-basket, weekend-peaking use. Fuel pumps attached to it concentrate arrivals at the same hours. Entertainment uses peak on Friday and Saturday evenings, which is precisely when club shopping peaks too. Meanwhile the enclosed mall being removed was, by every account of its recent condition, well below the traffic it was designed for.

So the honest framing is not more traffic versus less. It is that a site currently running under capacity on a weekday-shaped pattern is being converted to a site running near capacity on a weekend-evening-shaped pattern. Those load different turning movements at different times, and that is a question about signal timing and left-turn storage, not about square footage.

It is a solvable problem. Whether it has been solved is the sort of thing that lives in a traffic study and in the conditions attached to a permit, not in a rendering.

What Tuesday does and does not settle

The plan went before the Town Board on July 14, and the record was left open afterward for a public comment period. The resolutions on Tuesday are worded as decisions on the applications, which is what a board calendars once a record has closed and the town attorney has drafted findings.

Approvals on the wider project have been publicly anticipated later this year, with groundbreaking targeted for early 2027. So a vote either way on Tuesday is a step in a sequence rather than the end of one.

What it does settle is the entertainment component and the fuel component, which happen to be the two pieces that most distinguish this plan from an ordinary retail refresh. Take those out and the project is a mall with its roof removed. Leave them in and it is a regional destination with a different customer, a different peak hour, and a different relationship to the neighborhood behind it.

The resolutions are numbers 610 and 611. Anyone wishing to address the board on either has to file a "Person Intending to Speak" form with the Town Clerk. The meeting starts at 10 a.m.