ROL: In southern Blooming Grove, residents pour into a firehouse and vote overwhelmingly to form their own village, even if that means placing another layer of government – and taxes – over themselves.A week later, two other momentous votes: one to stop Kiryas Joel from erecting water storage tanks on Orange County parkland and the other to let a developer build 451 homes in neighboring Woodbury.
Three closely watched votes in the space of a week, all tied directly or indirectly to Kiryas Joel and its growth. Each outcome reflected, to some degree, a growing determination by neighbors to prevent the village from encroaching – even if that meant extraordinary steps.
Take the decision in Woodbury.
It’s almost unthinkable that people in Orange County would mobilize in support of a housing development, much less a big one that needs zoning breaks. The usual course would be to wage war against it.
But Thursday night, a crowd cheered as the Woodbury Town Board cleared the way for 451 new houses. Why were they celebrating? At least partly because it meant those 400 acres would never sprout something worse, in their view: Kiryas Joel-style condominium buildings.
“Granted, it’s going to create more volume,” supporter Steve Gunset reasoned after the board vote. “But if Kiryas Joel were to get it, it would create 30 times that volume.”
Kiryas Joel’s diminished clout has been evident since 2004, when opponents pressured the county government into challenging the village’s plans to tap the Catskill Aqueduct. The pendulum swung toward the critics, whose enormous grass-roots support suddenly countered the power of Kiryas Joel’s voting bloc.
The three recent votes have underscored this new political landscape, one of perpetual conflict for Kiryas Joel’s leaders.
“We’re very concerned and nervous about the reaction of ordinary people,” Gedalye Szegedin, the village administrator, said Friday. “We believe that ordinary people are misled by a few who want to use Kiryas Joel to scare people away.”
But those on the opposite side of the debate make a similar charge about Kiryas Joel’s leaders – that their tactics and rhetoric invite opposition, to the detriment of their constituents.
Jonathan Swiller, the Woodbury activist whose organization, OCEAN, fought the water tanks and supported the 451-home Woodbury project, regards those and the Blooming Grove votes as a repudiation of the insensitivity of Kiryas Joel’s leadership.
“They are all, in one way or another, reactions to the way that Szegedin deals with his neighbors, which is to say, with disdain,” Swiller said.
In the end, the growth causing so much strife comes down to an unchanging cultural pattern. Each year, up to 200 couples marry and settle in Kiryas Joel. For the leadership, that means roughly the same number of homes must be built on a shrinking supply of village land.
“Kiryas Joel doesn’t want to take over Woodbury,” Szegedin said. “Kiryas Joel doesn’t want to take over Monroe. Kiryas Joel doesn’t want to take over Blooming Grove. We want to provide for the couple of hundred marriages that take place in Kiryas Joel in a year.”
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One Response
Good to see that anti-semitism is alive and well in the USA.
I prefer it the European way “you smelly jews” etc., rather than the US way of thinly veiling it with justifiable concerns such as “overcrowding”, and “there is simply not enough water in orange county” and the multitude of other excuses used in the war against Kiryas Yoel.