When it rains in this neighborhood, brown-tinged water runs in sheets and pools on the lawns. When it doesn’t rain, reddish-brown dust settles in the houses, fine and thick. Vladimir Loos coughs. His dogs cough. “I have very bad breathing, just like I smoked 40 years,” Loos says in a heavy Czech accent. “And I don’t smoke.” Loos sleeps at night with a towel over his head. His doctor is sending him for an X-ray, to try to find out why there’s a rasping noise in his chest.? This water and this dust, Loos says, come from the Menorah Congregation bungalow colony, right behind his property and that of his neighbors. The trouble started in 2002, after colony owner Abraham Tabak bulldozed and put in a parking lot covered with a bed of red shale, just above his neighbors. Village officials say Menorah needed the lot because cars parked on the road.

Tabak didn’t return calls to his office on Tuesday or yesterday, and didn’t respond to a business card and message left there.

In 2003, the village sent an engineer to check Menorah’s lot. The engineer said Tabak should install proper drainage with proper trenching to correct the heavy runoff, build a solid wood stockade fence and either oil and chip the lot or spray it with water to keep down the dust.

Village Attorney Jeff Kaplan said Tabak built the lot before the state Department of Environmental Conservation required property owners to provide a storm water and drainage plan. And in 2002, Woodridge’s laws were unclear about whether building a parking lot required Planning Board approval.

Fallsburg code enforcer Allen Frishman said the trouble started when Loos planted small trees and positioned some large boulders in a line that encroached on Menorah’s property. Then Tabak built the parking lot.

Frishman said that since then, Tabak has made some corrections to trash problems, another bone of contention for the neighbors. The village had cited Tabak for overflowing trash bins.

“We, as a community, are trying to find some way to try to bring some peace to the neighborhood,” said Village Attorney Jeffrey Kaplan.

Loos has a binder full of letters and pictures that he and his neighbors have sent to the village that document everything: the dust, the floods, the drainage he installed to keep his property and his house from washing away. Loos and three neighbors are suing Tabak and the village and asking for damages and an order to correct the problems.

After four years of going to village meetings and writing letters, Loos is still fighting runoff water and breathing red dust, and he has no faith that the village will help.

“It’s a mess,” Frishman said. “It’s the Hatfields and the McCoys.”

ROL