Orange County, NY - Residents Mobilize Against KJ

Orange County, NY - In southern Blooming Grove, residents pour into a firehouse and vote overwhelmingly to form their own village, even if that means placing another layer of government over themselves.

A week later, two other momentous votes: one to stop Kiryas Joel from erecting water storage tanks on Orange County parkland and the other to let a developer build 451 homes in neighboring Woodbury.
Three closely watched votes in the space of a week, all tied directly or indirectly to Kiryas Joel and its growth. Each outcome reflected, to some degree, a growing determination by neighbors to prevent the village from encroaching.

Take the decision in Woodbury.
"Granted, it's going to create more volume," supporter Steve Gunset reasoned after the board vote. "But if Kiryas Joel were to get it, it would create 30 times that volume."

The three recent votes have underscored this new political landscape, one of perpetual conflict for Kiryas Joel's leaders.
"We're very concerned and nervous about the reaction of ordinary people," the village administrator, said. "We believe that ordinary people are misled by a few who want to use Kiryas Joel to scare people away."

But those on the opposite side of the debate make a similar charge about Kiryas Joel's leaders - that their tactics and rhetoric invite opposition, to the detriment of their constituents, and as a repudiation of the insensitivity of Kiryas Joel's leadership. "They are all, in one way or another, reactions to the way that the village administrator deals with his neighbors, which is to say, with disdain," they say.

"Kiryas Joel doesn't want to take over Woodbury," Szegedin said. "Kiryas Joel doesn't want to take over Monroe. Kiryas Joel doesn't want to take over Blooming Grove. We want to provide for the couple of hundred marriages that take place in Kiryas Joel in a year."