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Town Versus Village Now?
Will A Rescissions Battle Feed The Civil Rights Case

BLOOMINGBURG – On Monday, July 11, the Bloomingburg village board passed two new local laws that rescinded a 2014 agreement to have the Town of Mamakating run its planning board and zoning board of appeals. Two days later, on July 13, the Town of Mamakating's planning board went ahead and voted unanimously to rescind the site plan and subdivision approvals granted to developers Shalom Lamm and Kenneth Nakdimen for their Chestnut Ridge townhomes development, originally okayed by the village nearly a decade ago.

This new battle, which has been shaping up for weeks, may come to nothing... or it may spur yet more lawsuits and play into an ongoing civil rights suit brought by the developers and new Hasidic community in Bloomingburg, charging anti-Semitism against the town.

As of this week, the threatened lawsuits from the developer's side had not yet materialized. A letter from a spokesperson for the developers seemed to explain that the village board's action last week pre-empted the rescissions passed by the town.

In previous cases, moves by the town to counter village granting of certificates of occupancy, as well as from its own code enforcement officer, were ruled out of order, with indication that a town cannot usurp a village's own decisions.

As for the recent rescission decision: The town planning board had already focused twice on this issue in previous meetings, without rendering a decision but having gone over the issues very carefully, especially sales documents that became public some months ago that seemed to paint the developers as having deliberately deceived the village and town regarding their actual plans for development. The documents included emails between the developers, power point slides, and a memo from January 2013.

Among the points highlighted by planners were paragraphs stating,"Importantly, the developers have discreetly acquired hundreds of additional, contiguous acres in adjacent land parcels for future development and community infrastructures including schools, schuls, mikvahs, retail shopping, offices, Hastolah garage, Refuzh center, and large scale commercial development. Combined, the scale of what has been accumulated without public knowledge is breathtaking."

They also highlighted a statement that, "Critically, the development is in Bloomingburg, NY, the smallest village in NYS. With the initial occupancy of these homes, the owners of Chestnut Ridge will effectively control the local government, its zoning and ordinance."

The board adopted a resolution on May 24 charging the developers of Chestnut Ridge with fraud.

Spokespersons for the developer dismissed the documents as promotional materials, exaggerating the eventual build out of what is considered very likely to become an Hasidic village.

The planning board held a due process hearing on the possible rescinding of approvals on June 16. Attorneys for the developer argued in a nineteen page letter that the planning board lacks authority to rescind, and the entire matter was motivated solely by "anti-Hasidic animus" and threatened that if the approvals were rescinded, the developer would sue.

At last week's meeting, town attorney Ben Gailey said that rescission was required, "based on the material change in facts that the board is now aware of, and based on the materially false statements and misrepresentations made by the developer during the project review process."

However, he added that the rescission does not affect the fifty-one townhomes that have already been built, of which several have now been bought and occupied.

Meanwhile, building permits and certificates of occupancy will not be issued by the Town of Mamakating until the developer complies with state fire code and submits an amended plan... another issue that ended up in court with a decision in the developers' favor last year, but brought back up via an April 18 letter from the New York Department of State regarding deficiencies in both the entrance to the development and the roads within being two feet too narrow and in need of widening.

The developer has agreed to undertake the work.

Meanwhile, neither the developers nor their attorneys were present at the recent Mamakating meeting. By state law, the Village of Bloomingburg has sixty days from July 11 in which to take back control of the planning and zoning process that allowed the Chestnut Ridge development.

In the background to all of this is the ruling, scheduled for September, by federal judge Katherine Forrest on the $25 million civil rights lawsuit filed against the village and the town. In her first ruling on this last year, Forrest allowed the case to proceed in a 56-page legal opinion that noted how former mayor Frank Gerardi, and trustees James Johnson and Katherine Roemer were "motivated by discriminatory animus and intentionally acted to discriminate against Hasidic Jews." Other parts of the suit were dismissed, however, and since that time the sales documents that prompted the town's rescinding action, as well as others showing Mamakating's mail conversations with its short-lived public relations firm, who helped the town file a failed RICO civil case against Lamm and associates.

When denying the RICO case for a second time this spring, Forrest noted that the town and others apparently knew of misrepresentations and other shifts from planning approvals by at least 2010, four years after the proposals were first getting made. The countering civil rights case claims that ensuing actions only started after the community came to realize that Chestnut Ridge might be occupied by Hasidic Jews.

Talk about a complicated legal thicket...



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