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Village Clerk Has Until Friday To Determine Validity of Signatures
By Tina Traster
The Village of Spring Valley Clerk on Friday will verify and determine the validity of a petition that aims to dissolve the village and incorporate it into the towns of Ramapo and Clarkstown.
To date, some 2,600 signatures in favor of dissolution have been collected but a handful of insiders close to the situation say many signatures appear to come from outside of the jurisdiction or date back to 2022. To move forward, the Clerk needs to verify 1,300 legitimate signatures, which represents 10 percent of the village’s 13,000 registered voters.
“This could go either way,” said an insider.
It is no secret that the Village of Spring Valley has long been a den of dysfunction, depriving residents of the two-square-mile municipality a reliable raft of public services including street maintenance, road repairs, snow plowing, and more.
“People are so frustrated with the mismanagement of the village,” said a source, adding that petitioners canvassed people at shopping centers and in other public places. “In the past, there had always been pride and people were willing to pay an additional $5,000 to $7,500 for Village taxes in return for services. But with so much chaos and lack of responsiveness, who wouldn’t sign a petition?”
Who initiated the petition has become something of a parlor game, with fingers pointed at Republican operatives who want to shake things up in a village of 33,000 people, where the main two demographic majorities are split between Caribbean Islanders, with a large population of Haitians, and factions of Hasidic Jews.
This is not the first initiative to dissolve the Village and its government; an earlier effort was undertaken in 2022, but the petition never came to a public referendum.
Dissolving a village is not an easy task, and insiders in Ramapo say having to absorb Spring Valley would be a “headache.” Typically, when a Village is dissolved, the receiving town must take on the Village’s debt obligations, but also its assets. A special taxing district of former village residents would be set up to pay off the Village’s outstanding debt. In addition, Ramapo, which would inherit 90 percent of Spring Valley, though mostly residential sections, would be tasked with providing services and policing. The 10 percent of Spring Valley in Clarkstown is largely the commercial corridor along Route 59.
A prominent issue for Ramapo would be policing. Spring Valley has a handful of police officers and detectives who handle 50,000 calls per year, according to an insider, who added, “I don’t think Ramapo could handle that.”
In December 2020, South Nyack’s residents voted to dissolve the 142-year-old government and become part of the Town of Orangetown with nearly two thirds in favor.
State law allowed for a second referendum based on the board’s dissolution plan, but that never came to fruition. The movement to dissolve the village was driven by fear over the college’s then-pending sale of the 106-acre Nyack College Campus to Yeshiva Viznitz Dkhal Torath Chaim Inc. Village residents worried the potential cost of fighting land-use lawsuits against the yeshiva could bankrupt the village.
Schenley Vital, who won the Democratic primary for Mayor of the Village of Spring Valley, said he opposes the petition in a social media post. “Services are at risk. Dissolution means losing local control of essential services—like our excellent Police Department, and community programming—that we rely on every day.”
He also said, “Local leadership matters. Removing the Village means we’re further distanced from our government. Decisions about our future would be made by people with less direct connection to our diverse community. As a Village, we have a stronger voice to advocate for the changes we want to see. Dissolution would silence that voice.”
That “voice,” is largely the population of color, which is feeling the brunt of dislocation from rampant development that is aimed at housing the Hasidic community. Hasidic developers are voraciously snapping up large swaths of the village’s blighted properties.
Dissolution can take up to two years. In the former Village of South Nyack, the village board created and approved a plan that considers the disposition of village property, employees, municipal contracts, debt and other issues. Public hearings were held on the plan.
State law allows for a second referendum based on the board’s dissolution plan. Residents would need signatures of 25 percent of eligible voters for a second referendum. If voters then voted down the plan, there would be a four-year moratorium on seeking to dissolve the village.
The Village, Rockland County’s second largest, has a complicated past, including multiple instances of public leaders being convicted and serving time for fraud and abuse. In 2014, Mayor Demeza Delhomme was locked up in the county jail after a state Supreme Court justice found him in contempt of a court order to open the village’s civic center to host its summer camp. In 2015 the former mayor of Spring Valley, Noramie Jasmin, was convicted in federal court in the Southern District of New York of taking kickbacks to push through a community center and catering hall. She was also convicted of extortion and wire fraud and for selling her vote for $5,000 and a 50-percent ownership stake in the building. She served out a four-year prison term at Federal Prison Camp Alderson in West Virginia. In June 2015 former Spring Valley deputy mayor Joseph Desmaret was sentenced to three years in federal prison for his part in a corruption scheme involving a proposal to build a village-owned catering hall on Route 45 in Spring Valley. And in November 2017 Spring Valley trustee Vilair Fonvil was found guilty of corruption charges that accused him of stealing $11,000 from a summer camp program, which ended his career as a village official.
There is no secret that retiring Mayor Alan Simon has long battled with his fellow trustees. The Village is undergoing a developmental surge of housing designed for one non-secular group: the Hasidic community, while poor populations of color are being displaced.
The Village lacks an inside attorney, which has made it more difficult to navigate legal challenges. The Village’s union employees have been working without a CSEA contract for five years. The government’s 63 union employees are the lowest paid among village workers in Rockland and subsist a step above the poverty line, according to a fact-finder’s report that laid the groundwork for a potential contract. Most of the village union employees work a second job, according to the report.
On top of that, it has been more than three years since Rockland County took control of the Spring Valley building department following a first of its kind state order that designated Rockland County to administer and enforce the Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code and State Energy Conservation Construction Code within the Village of Spring Valley. The state ordered take over came months after a fire killed that two people at the Evergreen Court Home for Adults in March 2021.
County Officials say the Office of Buildings & Codes (OBC) has done 4,000 inspections and issued 16,000 violations to date since it was created.
