Reaction to Bloomingburg settlement; Some neighbors are distressed

Posted 8/21/12

BLOOMINGBURG, NY — The 396-unit development called Villages at Chestnut Ridge has not yet been fully developed, even though developer Shalom Lamm has been legally able to move forward with the …

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Reaction to Bloomingburg settlement; Some neighbors are distressed

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BLOOMINGBURG, NY — The 396-unit development called Villages at Chestnut Ridge has not yet been fully developed, even though developer Shalom Lamm has been legally able to move forward with the project for about two years. About 45 units are finished.

Mistrust runs so high with some members of the community that there is speculation that the developer is waiting to put up his own candidates for village government in the election in March. They think that if they win, they would re-instate the village planning board, which could allow Lamm to build the existing structures higher than the two stories now allowed.

It’s not yet clear if there will be a pro-Lamm candidate in the next election, but that’s what happened in previous elections, where allegations of voter fraud have sparked investigations and lawsuits. A lawsuit brought by challenged Hasidic voters against the Sullivan County Board of Elections (BOE) was settled on February 1, with a consent decree that stipulates the county will pay $555,000 in attorneys’ fees, and accept the oversight of a special election monitor. One BOE commissioner, Rodney Gaebel, has passed away and the other, Ann Prusinski, is resigning.

For members of the Rural Community Coalition (RCC), which has raised around $200,000 to wage legal battles connected to the development, the ruling is a disappointment. Holly Roche, president of RCC and Cathyann Wishinski, a board member of RCC who received a subpoena to testify in the BOE lawsuit, discussed the matter with The River Reporter. Roche said “I regard the consent decree to be a travesty, and I would have liked to see the challenged voters up on the stand in a court of law.”

Regarding dealing with the BOE, Wishinski said, “The board of elections needs to hire an election attorney or at least have someone on retainer that they can defer to, because election law is very specific, and they don’t know it.”

She went on to detail the case of one of the challenged voters in the BOE case. She said, “There is legal documentation that says they can’t find him; he’s been challenged since the beginning, since the first election. The sheriff said he doesn’t live there. He didn’t provide any proof, but because the Board of Elections did not do its job and purge the [voter] list, these names got moved to inactive.” So rather than being removed from the voter rolls, this person and other people in this situation can come back to the village and vote again.

There have been two elections in which a number of voters, most of them Hasidic, have been challenged. The first was in March 2014. After the election, the case went to court. Almost none of the 90 challenged voters who had been issued subpoenas showed up in court to testify about why they should be able to vote in Bloomingburg. Judge Stephan Schick upheld the BOE’s determination that the voters were not entitled to vote.

Roche described what she believes was an organized attempt at voter fraud. Just prior to the March 2014 election, some 20-odd buildings in the village were purchased by various LLCs that were all connected. Prior to the purchases, most of these were occupied; the majority were multi-family homes and apartment buildings. The occupants of these homes were asked to leave, in some cases under duress.

According to Roche, shortly after that, there was a mass voter registration of new voters who claimed addresses in the newly purchased buildings. But Roche and others say no one occupied these dwellings 30 days prior to the election; in fact, no one occupied them at all. Some were even gutted to the studs and, according to the Sullivan County Sheriffs report, uninhabitable.

In the next election, in September 2015, Roche said, there was more attention to detail. She said there were curtains in all the windows and lights going on and off, but still there were irregularities.

Along with allegations of voter fraud, there have been accusations of other criminal acts. Just days before the 2014 vote, the FBI raided Lamm’s offices and carried off a bunch of documents. But that was nearly two years ago, and the FBI has not done anything since then, at least not publicly.

Before the FBI action, an investigator from the New York State Attorney General’s office started looking into the matter, but his investigation was cut off without explanation. Roche and Wishniski believe cases of voter fraud have taken place and are not being prosecuted.

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