Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Seven Springs incorporation proposal upheld by appeals panel
A years-long proposal to create the village of Seven Springs in southern Orange County has staved off court challenges from two municipalities near the area petitioners want to incorporate, putting it that much closer to formation.
Last week, an appeals court panel in Brooklyn shot down legal disputes from the town of Monroe and village of Kiryas Joel to invalidate the incorporation petition led by Herman Wagschal, upholding earlier decisions in Orange County Supreme Court.
The area proposed for Seven Springs, which would be a primarily Hasidic community, includes about 2 square miles of land in northern Monroe, near Blooming Grove and Kiryas Joel. Unless the legal arguments are brought to the Court of Appeals, the 2019 petition will need to be weighed again by Monroe. If the town accepts it, Monroe leaders would have to schedule a public hearing for residents living within the boundaries ahead of a referendum.
Monroe's legal arguments have been based on a technicality, claiming that the petitioner failed to pay a $6,000 filing fee.
The Seven Springs petition drive began in 2018 when a group of Monroe residents was disappointed by a compromise that excluded their properties from an expansion of Kiryas Joel, a Satmar Hasidic community formed in 1975 whose population has rapidly grown from its original couple hundred residents to tens of thousands.
Key to the Seven Springs proposal was that it would give the new village control over zoning the mostly undeveloped land across state Route 17. Contention with Kiryas Joel arose when the village's administrator tried to preempt Wagschal filing the petition to form Seven Springs by filing his own petition to annex some of the land included in the new village's boundary proposal — a dueling petition issue that essentially boiled down to whoever filed first.
That's where Orange County Supreme Court Judge Sandra Sciortino came in.
Sciortino sorted through the complicated legal arguments and in 2019 said that the Seven Springs petition came first. In 2020, she also overturned the Monroe supervisor's technical objections to the petition, chalking the issue of whether the petitioner paid a $6,000 filing fee up to "confusion" since the petition did pay the fee a year before the petition was submitted. Her decisions were the same ones upheld last week by an appeals court panel.
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