Construction of the proposed arena project at Belmont Park will not start this spring as developers had hoped, though state officials insist the project remains on schedule.

Officials from Empire State Development said they are still hopeful that they can issue the final environmental impact statement on the project by the end of June, however, even if they keep to that estimate, no construction could begin until later in the summer at the earliest.

ESD will also ask the arena developers to contribute an additional $1.25 million to pay for an extended environmental review of the project. The ESD board voted last week to extend the contract of the environmental review firm AKRF for one year, through Sept. 2020.

New York Arena Partners, the developers that pitched the $1.18 billion project, had hoped to break ground by May to ensure that the New York Islanders could begin playing at the arena by the beginning of the 2021 hockey season. The developers propose to bring a 19,000-seat arena, 250-room hotel and 435,000-square-foot retail village to 43 acres of the horse racing track’s parking lots.

The development group is comprised of the Oak View Group, Sterling Equities, whose principals include the Wilpon family, and Scott Malkin Group. Malkin is also a partner in the majority ownership of the Islanders.

Rachel Shatz, ESD’s vice president of planning and environmental review, said at last week’s meeting that an enormous amount of comments have already been received on the arena plan, which has made the task of putting together the final environmental impact statement that much more difficult.

“I think this process has had quite an additional amount of public outreach than our typical ones, so I think this one probably could set a record for the number of comments that we’ve received, but that is the process working,” Shatz said, according to a video of the meeting on the ESD website. She added that once the final environmental impact statement is completed “hopefully by the end of the second quarter” that “probably a month after that” it would go to the ESD board for approval.

Even if ESD is able to stick to that new timeline, construction likely wouldn’t begin until at least August. And that’s without taking into consideration further delays that would be caused by a potential Article 78 lawsuit that may be filed by project opponents once the FEIS is accepted.

Two speakers at last week’s ESD meeting challenged the findings of the project’s draft environmental impact statement and urged the agency’s board to take a closer look at the concerns of the surrounding communities.

Jessica Alfonsi, representing the village’s Belmont Task Force, brought up the issue of a proposed natural gas pipeline that is supposed to provide energy to the new arena, since the DEIS concluded that there would be no significant impact to the natural gas supply.

“However, deep in the appendix there is a letter from National Grid which states the only way to heat the arena is with the extremely controversial Williams pipeline being approved,” Alfonsi said. “That alone should stop this project in its tracks.”

National Grid officials have said the company may have to declare a moratorium on supplying natural gas to big projects like the Belmont Park arena if its plans for the $1 billion gas pipeline didn’t secure the required state approval by May 15, according to published reports.

Gerald Bambrick, Floral Park’s village administrator, called for further examination of the area’s traffic congestion. His village is supporting New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s call for a traffic study by the city’s Department of Transportation to look at the impacts of the project on eastern Queens. The village has also asked Nassau County Executive Laura Curran to direct the county’s transportation department to undertake “a full and independent study of the traffic impacts of the proposed Belmont redevelopment on western Nassau County.

“The traffic analysis contained in the DEIS is clearly deficient and grossly under-estimates the traffic impacts that will result from the project,” Bambrick said.

More than 2,000 letters in opposition of the project from Floral Park residents have been submitted to ESD officials so far, according to Floral Park Mayor Dominick Longobardi.

The developers propose to bring a 19,000-seat arena, 250-room hotel and 435,000-square-foot retail village to 43 acres of the horse racing track’s parking lots. The Islanders have been splitting the team’s home games between Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and the revamped Nassau Coliseum during this season and plan to do the same for the next two seasons. However, despite the uncertainty of the new arena development schedule, a spokesperson for Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, which runs both Barclays and the Coliseum, said there have been no discussions on housing the hockey team beyond the 2020-21 season.

Perhaps the arena project’s biggest stumbling block is the property’s lack of viable mass transit service. Elected officials have said that creating full-time train service to Belmont’s Long Island Rail Road station should be a prerequisite to building the arena development.

The Nassau County Village Officials Association recently passed a resolution that any approval of the Belmont project must be conditioned on the requirement of a full-time station at Belmont and that the “developer be required to bear and pay all costs associated with the upgrade of the station, without the expenditure of public resources (tax revenue, bond proceeds or otherwise) to rebuild said station.”

Officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said they are exploring options for expanding service to Belmont, while estimating that full-time service would cost at least $300 million.