The committee’s co-chairmen — Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein, a Bellmorite and the county’s health commissioner, and Joe Baker, a retired lifelong Merokean and the president of the South Merrick Community Civic Association — led the meeting, along with employees of Arup, a London-based multinational consulting firm that the state hired to advise several NYRCRP planning committees along the South Shore. Also on hand were the Bellmore-Merrick Planning Committee’s other members, at least two state officials and Nassau County Legislator Dave Denenberg, of Merrick.

Eisenstein, Baker, Denenberg and Trent Lethco, an Arup consultant, told the attendees in Shore Road School’s auditorium about the N.Y. Rising Community Reconstruction Program. The committee,. Lethco said, would submit its final plan in March.

Forty-five minutes into the meeting, Eisenstein asked everyone to move to the school’s cafeteria. There attendees divided up into five groups and brainstormed project ideas. A representative from each table then read the proposals out loud.

Ali Frankel, a Bellmorite, the president of the South Bellmore Civic Association and a member of the Planning Committee, spoke for her table, saying that Bellmore-Merrick lacks well-maintained storm drains, emergency evacuation routes and emergency, solar-powered lighting. She proposed several fixes.

“Raising bulkheads … like along the Nautical Mile [in Freeport], where they raised it to about seven and a half feet, and that’s been productive over there,” Frankel said. “Raising the streets, install more backflow devices … Water absorption projects — we thought of maybe planting certain grasses or trees because we know those are a natural way of absorbing water.”

At the end of the meeting, Lethco revealed that Arup had already prepared its own “conceptual plan” for Bellmore-Merrick, which he said the state would publish on its NYRCRP website this week. “We’re going to roll your ideas into the conceptual plan,” he said, “but we’ve already done our own internal — absent public input — what we think should be in that plan.”