ROL: Campaigning and cajoling have risen to a fever pitch as residents brace for a momentous referendum next week on whether to turn most of the town into a village.Two years after residents petitioned to form a village, hoping to prevent neighboring Kiryas Joel from taking control of Woodbury’s rural western fringe, the issue is finally coming to a head – attended by a cacophony of arguments and last-ditch pleas.One plea came in the unusual form of a letter signed by Kiryas Joel Mayor Abraham Wieder and mailed to Woodbury homes this week. His message paints Kiryas Joel as a good neighbor and urges voters to reject “the formation of a new layer of bureaucracy.”Another Kiryas Joel angle: A village official who lives in Woodbury recently mobilized other Hasidic residents and signed up more than 200 to vote in the referendum. Three-quarters of them live in Brooklyn but have summer bungalows in Woodbury.

Meanwhile, the two Woodbury factions that fought bitterly over Bill Brodsky’s 451-home development plan are now battling over the village proposal – again accusing each other of misleading residents and harboring ulterior motives.

Proponents, led by Ralph Caruso, have formed the “Citizens for the Preservation of Woodbury” and distributed a seven-page flier arguing that a village would hinder Kiryas Joel’s expansion aims, without disrupting services or driving up taxes.

OCEAN, the citizens’ group led by Jonathan Swiller, disputes those claims and has urged people to vote “no” because the consequences of creating a village haven’t been adequately explained.

Suspicion is rampant. In fact, Kiryas Joel’s efforts to stop the vote – it has a pending court challenge – or defeat the proposal at the polls has made some wonder if the village’s leaders are protesting just a little too much.

Is it actually in their interest for Woodbury to form a village? After all, the thinking goes, why would the mayor of Kiryas Joel ask residents to vote down the village – unless he wanted them to do the very opposite?

Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin dismissed this line of argument yesterday, pointing out that the village’s officials and real estate interests have consistently opposed the proposal since it surfaced in 2004.

“Everybody has been singing with the same voice now for two years,” he said.

In a final twist, it turns out the roughly 200 voter registrations turned in on Monday were too late to make the voting rolls. The deadline was Friday.

But town Clerk Desiree Potvin said yesterday those voters could still vote. They would have to come to Town Hall on Tuesday, two days before the referendum, and present a property deed, utility bill or other evidence that they spend at least part of the year in Woodbury.
The question being put to voters on Thursday is whether to incorporate a village encompassing all of the Town of Woodbury except its portion of Harriman. The result would be a 36.8-square-mile village whose borders would be virtually the same as the town’s. It would have its own elected leaders and control Woodbury’s zoning.The proposal sprung from a desire to prevent the expansion of Kiryas Joel, Woodbury’s densely populated neighbor. But whether it would truly do so or merely create a costly extra layer of government is the crux of the debate raging in town.