CURRENT AFFAIRS
The above head is a borrowing from the Henrik Ibsen/Arthur Miller play about honesty, morality and truth-telling. It aptly describes Mayor Leo A.W. Wiegman, the writer of an “open letter to Croton residents.” printed in the June 2, 2011, issue of Croton-on Hudson’s newspaper of record, The Gazette.
What is peculiar about his letter is that an unsigned verbatim version of the text also appears on the local Democratic Party’s website. In the past, once an election campaign was behind us, it was traditional for the Mayor to abandon party labels and to govern and report to the people as their mayor, not as the titular head of a political party. This administration has insisted on stubbornly maintaining a combative us-versus-them attitude toward residents ever since its election two years ago.
Misrepresentation has become the order of the day, and is now a common practice. Aside from the letter’s obvious objective of keeping political animosities alive in the village and rubbing salt in still-open wounds, several of its statements play hob with the truth. The following numbered excerpts from the offensive letter are followed by my refutation of each distortion, misrepresentation or outright lie.
(1) Wiegman: “We did adopt zoning legislation to encourage commercial property owners in Harmon to improve their properties.”
Advocates of Harmon rezoning never presented a single scrap of evidence that a market exists for cramped, walk-up, virtually slumlike apartments over ground-floor retail stores in a commercially zoned area. For Mayor Wiegman to describe such apartments with inadequate parking spaces and no green space as an improvement is laughable.
(2) Wiegman: “Unfortunately for all of us, a very few residents have chosen to fight these changes in court rather than at the ballot box.”
The NY State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) was enacted in 1975 and requires municipalities to prepare or cause to be prepared an environmental impact statement when changes impacting the environment are proposed. Each municipality is responsible for the propriety of their actions. When municipalities break the law, as Croton did, no agency other than the municipality itself or an alert citizenry polices its actions.
If an improper determination has been made by a municipality and citizens can demonstrate that they may be harmed by it, the only redress stipulated by the law is for them to take legal action under Article 78. No significance can be attached to the number of citizens bringing an action. Has Mayor Wiegman forgotten the far-reaching national impact of Brown vs. Board of Education, which involved a small number of litigants?
Mayor Wiegman is both uninformed and disingenuous in his suggestion that the proper avenue for ensuring compliance is the ballot box when an Article 78 action is the sole remedy available to citizens. An election is not the proper medium for making changes in legislation affecting property rights.
(3) Wiegman: “The litigation is preventing many commercial property owners in the village from beginning renovations that would improve the commercial ratables, (4) while costing the village thousands in litigation expenses.”
I challenge Mayor Wiegman to publicly identify the “many commercial property owners in the village” who were prevented by the Arttcle 78 action from beginning renovations.
It is insensitive and disingenuous for Mayor Wiegman to accuse those who support the Article 78 action of engaging in barratry—the persistent instigation of groundless lawsuits. It is also fatuous for Mr. Wiegman to portray those who endorse the Article 78 action as troublemakers bent on harming the village by bleeding it white with legal expenses.
As for the legal expenses the Village has incurred, I would remind Mayor Wiegman and the Village Board they were warned by many citizens that the law they were about to enact was defective, yet they chose to ignore the warning.
It may be a bitter pill for the Mayor to swallow, but New York‘s court system has consistently ruled in favor of strict compliance with the provisions of SEQRA, as Judge Albert Lorenzo has so emphatically ruled in this case. This administration has no one to blame but itself.
Croton’s commercial property owners immediately saw through the administration’s Harmon zoning changes as a transparent scheme. After commercial property owners made the costly structural alterations described as “improvements,” the administration would then raise assessments and impose higher taxes. This would enable the administration to reduce taxes for a more numerous bloc of taxpayers—residential voters.
