For the Cragsmoor Association and other members of the mountain-based community, a proposed Buddhist retreat to be built in their area is affording them neither peace nor enlightenment — quite the opposite, it would seem. The association held a meeting last Saturday, April 12, at the Cragsmoor Firehouse to discuss Dharmakaya, a proposed Buddhist hermitage campus that would reportedly span 70,000 square feet in the mountain community.

"The Cragsmoor Association, nor the Cragsmoor community — neither of us are against this project," says Jim McKenney, the association's president. "The association has not taken a position for or against it, and we have citizens on all sides, as you may well imagine…. We want to be careful and know what is being planned, and make sure it's being done in a sensitive and thoughtful manner…We're not against this project, we're expressing concerns."

The primary concern the association and other residents are expressing revolves around the fear that the retreat may endanger the area's water supply, a problem the community has encountered in years past, and which has been a documented concern even since a November Ellenville Journal article by Dianne Wiebe.

"Many people talked about, and one of our hydrologists talked about, how people up here have built new houses, and their neighbors around have lost their water and have had to drill new wells," says McKenney of last Saturday's meeting. "And how, during the years that the Cragsmoor Inn was [operating], back in the turn of the century up through the late forties and maybe into the fifties, that they routinely ran out of water during the summer, which was of concern to people."

As if to underscore the threat they feel, several Cragsmoor residents wearing badges reading, "got water?" attended the last Town of Wawarsing Planning Board meeting, held on Tuesday, March 25, where representatives from the Dharmakaya project appeared before the board to discuss the next phase of the hermitage's development.

According to McKenney, a campus that big is required to have two wells, and is also required to conduct two 72-hour drill tests on their wells to prove that the campus will not draw too much water away from residents. So far, he says, the engineers working for Dharmakaya have only performed one 24-hour test on a well, though at a much higher volume than the state deems necessary.

"There's the continuing concern that, over time, they may continue to draw down water, even though from the results of their tests they're able to pump a lot of water; we're concerned that just means they'll be able to take it away from their neighbors even faster," says McKenney. He also says that, because the water tests pumped "five or six times the amount" of water the state requires, "it gives pause…why would you draw that much water and test at that level if you didn't have some idea in mind, that maybe this is going to get bigger some time down the road?"

That's the other concern the group has: what will happen in the future should the proprietors of the Dharmakaya retreat decide to expand? Or what if they decide to relocate their hermitage elsewhere, thereby making the campus available for purchase by another organization whose intentions are less altruistic than Dharmakaya's?

"It just seems entirely inappropriate to have this large corporate campus-type facility put in what is a community that's on the national register of historic places, and is [on the register] for the old houses, wood-frame houses that are widely spaced apart, that don't look anything like a corporate campus," says McKenney.

McKenney says that the association's next step is to see what the town planning board determines after examining the final environmental impact statement the hermitage has submitted. The Cragsmoor Association will continue to try and point out what they see as the statement's deficit — such as the aforementioned drill-tests — and hope that the board will ask the group to go back and conduct the tests as they ought to.

"We support the planning board, and in general, think they're doing a pretty good job for a planning board that's not really been up against this kind of planning process before," says McKenney. "This is maybe one of the larger environmental impact statements, if not the largest, that they've ever been up against."

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