FORESTBURGH, NY — Developers are suing the town of Forestburgh for its alleged “ongoing and persistent discrimination against Orthodox Jews seeking to build and buy homes in the town,” according to a press release from two law firms representating the plaintiffs.

Storzer & Associates and Savad Churgin said Friday that the civil rights lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of Lost Lake Holdings LLC and Mischconos Mazah LLC, who jointly purchased the 2,095-acre property for $9,550,000 in 2020, and a Jewish rabbi and his wife. The suit alleges that in November 2023, the town enacted a zoning change to stop Jewish developers from building a residential community.

The lawyers referred to an earlier lawsuit against Forestburgh, filed in December 2022, that is still ongoing. “This latest effort by Forestburgh and its town board to stop the development violates the federal Fair Housing Act and the United States Constitution,” they said in a press release.

The complaint compares the town’s resistance to Lost Lake with its welcoming response in 2011 to a 2,000-home development and golf course, granting its rezoning request and greenlighting the project two years later. However, after the project was sold to Orthodox Jewish developers in 2020, the lawyers said,m “the town immediately changed its position towards the project.” Under pressure from local residents objecting to an influx of Orthodox Jews, town officials denied building permits and imposed “exorbitant” new fees, they said.

“While the project would sell homes to people regardless of their race or religion, there is substantial demand for housing in the region by Orthodox Jews,” the lawyers said.

Lawsuits follow stop-work order

The lawsuits follow a series of developments at Lost Lake that started in November 2021, when Forestburgh’s Zoning Board of Appeals issued a 36-page report that found “the developer's own design standards are materially different than what was approved and that the original design standards were incorporated into the SEQRA [State Environmental Quality Review] Findings Statement.”

In February 2022, the town board suspended all town-issued permits and all construction at Lost Lake until the developer submitted its proposed changes to the town board and underwent additional review by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). “The developer has not submitted anything to address this to date,” the board said at the time.

On October 13, 2022, Natalie Browne, an environmental program specialist with the DEC, told Halberstam that on a recent site inspection she found that all of the sediment traps and sediment basins had been built incorrectly. “The lack of erosion and sediment controls may lead to a contravention of water quality standards in the receiving water,” which would constitute a violation of environmental law, Browne wrote.

On December 22, 2022, Brian Drumm, manager of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Region 3, Bureau of Ecosystem Health, issued a stop-work order for Lost Lake. Drumm said that during a site inspection he found construction underway without a permit of an elevated road across a waterway. He ordered Lost Lake to submit a plan within seven days detailing how the the developer would restore the disturbed freshwater wetland, into which fill material had been dumped, to its prior condition.

On January 1, 2023, a stop-work order was posted on the site. On January 27, Forestburgh’s code enforcement officer, Glenn Gabbard, gave Lost Lake a February 15 deadline to restore the site for inspection by the building department.

On February 2, 2023, the town board voted to take legal action against Lost Lake. They read a letter from Justin Evans on behalf of the Hartwood Club Board of Trustees asserting that “the developer and his associates have continued to build significant infrastructure illegally without any approvals from the lead SEQR agency, without any valid regulatory permits, through wetlands, and despite stop-work notices, despite DEC violations notices, and on and on and on.”