February 4 - 10, 2016

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Your Award-Winning News Source for the Upper Delaware River Valley Region Since 1975

Vol. 42 No. 5

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FEBRUARY 4 - 10, 2016

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www.riverreporter.com

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$1.50

Bloomingburg lawsuit settled for $555,000 Challenged voters avoid testifying By FRITZ MAYER

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ONTICELLO, NY — The Sullivan County Legislature has voted to accept a consent decree to settle a lawsuit brought by Hasidic voters from the Village of Bloomingburg. The lawsuit charged that two Board of Elections (BOE) commissioners, the late Rodney Gaebel and Anne Prusinski, discriminated against Hasidic voters by issuing a determination that they were not eligible to vote because they were not residents of the village. The vote came on January 28 and was opposed only by Catherine Owens, the legislator who represents Bloomingburg in District Four. The agreement marks the second time that a group of challenged voters claiming Bloomingburg residency has avoided explaining in open court why they should be allowed to vote in the village after an investigation by the county sheriff’s office and the BOE have determined that they are not eligible to vote there. The first time was after the village election in 2014, when 90 Hasidic voters challenged the BOE determination. When the time came for them to appear in court, none decided to do so, despite subpoenas, and instead opted to pay fines. This time around, the voters opted to settle the case before they would have been required to explain under oath why they should have been qualified to vote in the village. The consent decree calls for the county to pay attorney’s fees of $550,000 to the plaintiff’s attorneys. It also provided for a special monitor to be appointed to watch the BOE regarding future voter challenges. The consent decree also calls for the BOE not to discriminate against Hasidic voters or voters of any religion, which the BOE says it did not do, a position that is acknowledged in the document. The consent decree lays out a number of steps that must be followed if voters in Bloomingburg are again challenged; the steps are mostly related to

closely adhering to state election law and involving input from the monitor. The county attorney’s office has admitted that a couple of procedural lapses occurred in the past. The consent decree said that the BOE denied the Hasidic petitioners who were registered in Bloomingburg the right to vote, but the consent decree did not address the question of whether the voters actually live in the village, which has been a matter of significant dispute by village residents. One told The River Reporter there will probably be more voter challenges coming before the next vote in March. The second vote in which Hasidic voters were challenged involved the matter of whether the Village of Bloomingburg should be dissolved. Developer Shalom Lamm, who built the controversial 396-unit development Villages at Chestnut Ridge in Bloomingburg, and those allied with him, wanted the village to remain as is, which will allow residents moving into the development enormous control over village government. The other faction, those opposed to Lamm and his development, want the village to be dissolved, thereby diluting political power of the people living in the village. The vote in the Sullivan County Legislature to allow the county attorney to negotiate the consent decree came one week after the board voted to hire an outside attorney to represent Prusinski in the ongoing lawsuit, after the county determined that the county’s legal department would no longer represent her. Under the agreed terms, had she been found to have discriminated against Hasidic voters, she would have had to pay for the defense out of her own pocket. Other lawsuits remain regarding Lamm and the development, including one accusing the developer of fraud under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was thrown out by a federal judge in September 2015, but was recently appealed.

TRR photo by Fritz Mayer

Early spring predicted

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PPER DELAWARE VALLEY — The warm weather of the past few days has left Ten Mile River mostly free of ice, and the ice on many of the lakes in the region looks like it might not be thick enough to walk on. Winter is not over yet, but the warm temperatures the region has experienced since the beginning of the season are expected to continue into spring. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), the El Niño—a supply of warmer-than-normal water in the southern Pacific Ocean—which has been influencing weather for the past several months, is past its most extreme point but is still active. Because of that, the chance that temperatures will be higher than average through April is greater than that temperatures will be lower. Precipitation has an equal chance of being more or less than average. NWS predicts a likelihood that the El Niño will diminish and be replaced by a La Niña event by sometime next fall, which is likely to have the opposite effect on temperatures here in the Upper Delaware Valley.

Jewel of The Heron Emerald Ballroom opens in Narrowsburg

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SPANNING 2 STATES, 4 COUNTIES, AND A RIVER THAT UNITES US


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