Viznitz Hasidim in Sullivan County seek to forge their own village with 929 acres
KIAMESHA LAKE - A synagogue meeting room in the Catskills was packed with congregants and visitors alike on Thursday evening, as a contentious public matter got its first airing in that religious space.
At a hearing led by two town supervisors, residents weighed in on a petition by the Viznitz Hasidic community to form its own village, a nearly 1.5-square-mile area that takes in its small enclave and hundreds of acres of surrounding woods. Located mostly in the town of Thompson and partly in Fallsburg, the village of Ateres would have its own leaders and laws, including zoning rules to shape future development.
Some came to praise or oppose the idea. One who stepped up to voice support was Yehuda Miller of South Fallsburg, who said forming a village would empower its residents to "progress and prosper" and follow the path of places like nearby Monticello or Jeffersonville.
"Just like the other villages in Sullivan County, Ateres deserves the right to govern itself and address its unique needs," he said.
Thompson Supervisor Bill Rieber interrupted Miller and others to remind them of the hearing's narrow legal purpose: to suggest technical faults in the petition itself. He and Fallsburg Supervisor Katherine Rappaport must decide if the document satisfies all legal requirements before scheduling a referendum for residents in the proposed village area. That vote decides the proposal's fate.
Most speakers focused on alleged technical flaws after Rieber's instructions. Some said they found enough faults in the 99 petition signatures to disqualify the petition.
What's the proposal?
The Ateres petition, filed on June 14, charts a jigsaw-shaped area of 929 acres on the north side of Route 17, not far from the Resorts World Catksills casino and nearby Kartrite Resort & Indoor Waterpark. Much of the land is undeveloped.
One small section is the neighborhood where the Vitznitz community began to settle about 20 years ago and roughly 140 families now live. The group had opened a yeshiva there in 1992 in the former Gibber Hotel, part of the former Borsht Belt resort constellation.
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Some 834 people, more than half of them children, live in the proposed village, according to the petition. That satisfies one of New York's few requirements for a new village: that it have at least 500 regular inhabitants. Only 322 potential Ateres residents are 18 or older and qualified to vote.
This is a second run for Ateres. Viznitz leaders proposed a smaller village of about 350 acres with the same name in 2005, only to drop the petition the following year.
What are the arguments?
Zev Tarkletaub, an organizer of the village proposal, said its main goal is to set up a local government that can meet his Hasidic community's unique needs with greater focus than a town with a larger area to govern and competing priorities. He stressed the need for sidewalks and street lighting to protect pedestrians, especially those walking on dark roads on Friday nights.
"We feel by making our own village, we can put safety before other things," Tarkletaub said in an interview after the hearing.
Tarkletaub, a Los Angeles native who has lived in Kiamesha Lake since enrolling at its Viznitz yeshiva 16 years ago, disputed the idea that zoning control and denser development were the main motives. Most people in his community, he said, left New York City and Rockland County for a less congested lifestyle and don't want to usher in high-density housing.
"We want to live in this place because we like this place, and we want this place to be the way it is," he said. "We're not looking for high density. We're looking just as what the town has approved up until now. That's what we want, and we're happy with that."
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Rieber, the Thompson supervisor, is among those who worry the village formation would lead to excessive development, following a "road map" he said had been set in Rockland and Orange counties. Both counties have large Hasidic communities with dense villages: Kiryas Joel in Orange, and New Square and Kaser in Rockland.
"You're going to have runaway development in an area with zero town control," Rieber said in an interview a few days before the hearing.
How unusual are new villages?
New York has about 535 villages, most dating to the 1800s and first decades of the 1900s. One of the latest was Mastic Beach on Long Island, which was formed in 2010 but didn't last long: residents voted to dissolve it six years later. Two arose in Orange County in 2006: Woodbury and South Blooming Grove.
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More recently, the trend has been just the opposite: to explore dissolving villages to shed layers of local government and save taxpayers money. The state has encouraged those efforts by offering grants to help with dissolution studies.
Some speakers at Thursday's hearing noted that trend to oppose the creation of Ateres, saying it ran counter to the movement away from villages.
What comes next?
Rieber and Rappaport plan to continue the Ateres petition hearing at the Viznitz synagogue on Aug. 22.
Once they close the hearing, they have 10 days to decide if the petition is valid. If they reject it, the petitioners can correct the flaws and submit a new one. If they approve it, the supervisors must allow 30 days for a legal challenge and then schedule a referendum if none arises.
In the meantime, two state bills are pending that could derail the Ateres petition and a Hasidic village proposal in Orange County, by raising the population threshold for new villages to 2,000 and setting other new rules. Both bills were approved by the Legislature in June and are awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul's decision to sign or veto them.
"I implore the governor to call the damn bill up and sign it," Rieber told the USA Today Network.
Hochul's office said she was still reviewing both village incorporation bills.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Viznitz Hasidic group petitions for village in Thompson, Fallsburg
