Suffolk County has put a fork in the $2.8 million Midway Crossing project that would have created a massive mixed-use development between the Ronkonkoma Long Island Rail Road station and MacArthur Airport.
County officials terminated the master development agreement with JLL Tuesday, citing the Chicago-based company’s lack of progress on the project.
While this version of the project is now dead in the water, the county will restart the process and open up proposals from other developers to reimagine the 179 acres south of the LIRR.
“Today Suffolk County took steps to reimagine the Midway project, paving the way for new ideas and strategies to benefit the surrounding communities, improve infrastructure, and create a powerful economic engine for our county,” Suffolk County spokesman Michael Martino said. “In the coming months, the county will seek expressions of interest from interested parties to ensure this historic project will become a reality.”
A JLL executive that headed the project has yet to respond to a request for comment.
The most recent version of the proposed Midway Crossing development had featured a 300,000-square-foot convention center, about 2 million square feet of office space geared toward life sciences and biotechnology research, a 300-room hotel and more than 300,000 square feet of “destination retail.”
The massive project had been projected to take as long as 15 years to complete all of its four phases, with part of the plan to connect the Ronkonkoma LIRR station to a potential new north terminal at MacArthur Airport via an 1,800-foot walkable pedestrian corridor.
The proposed development would require as much as $1 billion in public funding to be used for building infrastructure and public assets, including water, sewer, utilities and roads, as well as the convention center and airport terminal. The failure of the master developer to garner the necessary public funding was one of the main reasons for the delay and ultimate termination, observers said.
In Oct. 2024, the Town of Islip Industrial Development Agency extended the deadline through Jan. 31 for JLL to come up with at least $100M in state and/or federal funding for the project’s infrastructure in advance of forming a Midway Crossing Local Development Corporation.
Last summer, former New York Islander and NHL Hall of Famer Patrick LaFontaine and a business partner sued development executives after getting iced-out of the proposed public/private project. LaFontaine and Steve D’Iorio filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against two executives of JLL, claiming the execs received “unjust enrichment” and seeking restitution for services rendered on the project by the plaintiffs. The suit is still pending.
Public stakeholders for Midway Crossing had included Suffolk County, the Town of Islip, New York State and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, while Chicago-based JLL and Cameron Engineering, which merged into Rock Island, Ill.-based IMEG Corp. last year, are joined by Kansas City-based Crawford Architects as private-sector partners.
The Long Island Regional Planning Council designated the Midway Crossing development as a project of regional significance in 2022. The Long Island Association listed the proposed project as one of its policy priorities in 2023 and again this year.
The idea for developing the area between the Ronkonkoma LIRR station and MacArthur came about via a 2017 request for qualifications from the county with input from the Town of Islip. The Suffolk County Legislature voted in June 2018 to approve a memorandum of agreement for redeveloping the site, now mostly used for commuter parking. The county selected the initial JLL plan over other proposals that included between 1,200 and 1,900 units of multifamily residences, office space, a hotel and conference center, and a 2 million-square-foot industrial park.
Now that the county will be seeking new proposals for the Ronkonkoma project, Long Island developers are ready to step in.
Syosset-based Blumenfeld Development Group (BDG) was one of the firms that LaFontaine and D’Iorio had initially brought into the project, only to be rebuffed by JLL.
“Midway Crossing remains one of the most important next chapters in Long Island’s development progress,” Ed Blumenfeld, president and founder of BDG told LIBN. “The ability to move it forward is in the best interests of the town, the county, and the region as a whole, as there is no other property on the Island that has its transportation assets.”