Organizers of the proposed Village of Seven Springs, a new Hasidic village next to Kiryas Joel in Orange County, won two more court decisions this week in support of their village petition. An appeals court panel on Wednesday rejected separate legal challenges brought by the town of Monroe and Kiryas Joel, both of which had posed objections that would have headed off a referendum on incorporating the proposed village. This means Monroe officials must finally take up the village petition submitted in 2019 unless there is more court wrangling. If the town doesn’t appeal again, its supervisor must determine if the petition satisfies all legal requirements and either approve or reject it. Approval would lead to a public hearing and then a vote by residents of the 1.9-square-mile area that would be incorporated.

Steven Barshov, attorney for the village petitioners, said on Thursday that his clients were pleased with the “thoughtful and correct” decisions by the Brooklyn-based appeals court. “We’re looking forward to the town expeditiously processing the incorporation petition at this time,” he said. The village formation effort began in 2018 after an earlier court battle over expanding Kiryas Joel that left some property owners unhappy that their homes or land were excluded from the final deal. The Seven Springs proposal would create a new municipality with zoning control over most of the remaining unincorporated land in northern Monroe.

The Satmar Hasidic village annexed 220 acres from Monroe, less than half of the 507 acres in the annexation petition property owners filed in 2013. The Seven Springs proposal would encompass an area larger than Kiryas Joel, with large swaths of undeveloped land on both sides of Route 17, and include half of the Harriman Commons shopping center. Just 295 voters lived in the village area when the petition was filed.

Kiryas Joel’s administrator tried to pre-empt the Seven Springs petition by filing a petition to annex Monroe land that included some properties in the village petition. But an Orange County judge ruled in 2019 that the village petition came first, despite a bizarre sequence of events that included an assault and the stealing of the village petition as it was delivered to Monroe Town Hall.

The appeals court affirmed both that ruling and a second one in 2020 that rejected Monroe Supervisor Tony Cardone’s objection to the Seven Springs petition. Cardone had argued that the petitioners had technically failed to pay the $6,000 required filing fee, despite submitting that amount for an earlier version of the petition. Both cases sat in legal limbo in the Appellate Division for two years during the pandemic, which slowed court activity. They resurfaced in October when lawyers made back-to-back arguments for the two cases to a panel of judges, who were plainly skeptical about the petition objections.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)