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Thursday, June 20, 2019

Seven Springs proposal survives as village bills go nowhere in Legislature 

Among the bills left for dead at the end of the legislative session in Albany were four that would have derailed a proposed new village next to Kiryas Joel by changing or ordering a re-examination of the rules for creating villages in New York.

The final attempt was a short proposal by Sen. James Skoufis on Monday that would have simply raised the minimum number of inhabitants for a new village to 1,000 instead of 500. His bill would have applied to pending petitions and effectively blocked plans by Hasidic property owners to establish the Village of Seven Springs in Monroe, since only about 610 people live in the 1.9 square miles to be incorporated.

State lawmakers were still passing a barrage of final bills for the 2019 session on Thursday when Skoufis, a Woodbury Democrat, announced the village bill wouldn’t be among them.

“New York State’s village incorporation laws are astonishingly weak and have been increasingly used by hostile developers as a bludgeon against town governments,” Skoufis said in a statement. “That’s why I’ve tirelessly worked this legislative session to update these antiquated, abused laws.

“Despite authoring three separate bills to address the Seven Springs issue in the Town of Monroe, the Legislature’s leadership failed to support any of my common-sense proposals and, more importantly, failed the people of New York State who are suffering under these harmful laws.”

He vowed to continue fighting the Seven Springs proposal, which is awaiting the outcome of a lawsuit demanding that Monroe Supervisor Tony Cardone review the petition and schedule a referendum if it meets all legal requirements. Monroe’s handling of the Seven Springs proposal had been cast into uncertainty by the filing of an annexation petition by Kiryas Joel that involved some of the same properties.

Skoufis had an earlier bill that would have added new criteria to form a village and opened referendums on new villages to all voters in the town where they’re located, not just those in the area to be incorporated. Another proposal would have frozen all pending village plans in New York for two years while a study was conducted to improve the state’s laws on forming, dissolving or merging municipalities.

https://www.recordonline.com/news/20190620/seven-springs-proposal-survives-as-village-bills-go-nowhere-in-legislature

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