NYCOM: Glen Cove's 3D Law is Innovative

Thanks to the passage of Glen Cove's Visual Simulation Ordinance, the city can now add development design innovator to its long list of accolades. 

Mayor Ralph Suozzi announced at a City Council meeting Tuesday that the city earned first place honors at the 23rd Annual New York Conference of Mayors and Empire State Report's Local Government Achievement Awards for the legislation, which requires visual simulations or 3D digital animations for proposed large scale developments. 

NYCOM, which is an association of government officials that advances interests of cities and villages in the state legislature and with state agencies, honored 13 municipalities in the areas Economic Development, Public Works, Public Safety and Government Administration at the awards this year. The awards were presented during the association's 101st annual meeting on May 16 in Saratoga Springs.

Glen Cove won in the Public Management and Administration category, with NYCOM officials calling the ordinance a model for other communities because "it utilizes modern technological tools and creates digital representations to take the guess work out of evaluating how a development will fit into a neighborhood."

"I'm really proud of this," Suozzi said. "First place is a great thing." 

The law, which enables viewers to see how the proposed projects would impact the community, was passed in December 2009. The simulations and animations enable the viewer to walk through the development at eye-level, choosing to be anywhere in the space. It is expected to be very user-friendly for the general public. 

"We put a lot of work into this. We thought about what was wrong with the process today, how hard it was for the laypeople to understand," Suozzi said.

The project will be featured in the summer edition of the Empire State Report magazine and the July-August issue of NYCOM's Municipal Bulletin. The city is also slated to receive a letter of recognition from the National League of Cities and the project's description, city officials said, will be added to the Best Practices section of NYCOM's Web site.

"It just shows that the work we're doing here to strengthen our processes, to make things more transparent, to make the process easier to identify, especially large scale projects … really has significance outside of Glen Cove," Suozzi said. "Good ideas are always good ideas, and so to be recognized by NYCOM is really a significant accomplishment because there's many municipalities. Think how many governments there are on Long Island alone, and they've taken all the counties and villages and towns upstate."