Dearly Beloved, We Have Gathered Here To FOIL
Monroe has a tainted well that it claims Kiryas Joel is responsible for, but why are we only now hearing about this? And more on what's happening at Falkirk.
Above: Syrup Proprietor and Hanhallah’s candidate for Woodbury Village Trustee, Tyler Etzel Jr. (Hanhallah is a yiddish term used by members of the Satmar community to refer to its leadership. In today’s case, the term refers to Grand Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum, Kiryas Joel Village Administrator Gedalya Segedin, and others.)
Etzel is pictured attending a presentation at the Falkirk Golf Course in March 2022. Wayne Corts conducted the presentation that evening to explain his plan for turning the golf course into a condominium project. The Monroe Gazette has obtained the audio of Mr. Corts's presentation, which is currently being transcribed for publication. Woodbury residents should ask Mr. Etzel Jr. — if elected Village Trustee — whether or not he would support converting the Falkirk Golf Course into condominiums and potentially allowing Kiryas Joel to annex it. Also in attendance was Richard Cattagio, yes, this guy.
If Etzel Jr., John Keleman, Jim Freiband, and Matthew Fabbro are successful in taking over the Woodbury Village Board; they will remove the current Woodbury Planning Board Chair, Christopher Gerver, and replace him with Mr. Cattagio, who is currently under investigation by the New York State Division of Human Rights.
I am probably showing my age with a reference to Prince in today’s headline.
Regardless, I’d like to provide a short-ish post today to update you on some things, both with this newsletter and in local news.
This will give me time to hear back from the Town of Blooming Grove Police Department on those speed tests and noise meters, which we discussed here.
It will also give me time to finish the transcript of Mr. Corts’s presentation concerning the Falkirk Golf Course.
(As a bonus, I can also use that time to do some security precautions because, despite being in Los Angeles, Mr. Courts has at least one Woodbury resident accusing him of burning down their house. Why? Because that resident interfered in another Corts-related real estate transaction.)
Sound good?
I mean, not the house burning down part.
The short post for today …
First, I’ve heard it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to get local news on Facebook.
This is because Facebook Admins — who, I want to remind everyone, basically provide free labor to a multibillion-dollar corporation as both customer service representatives and administrators of groups and pages — want to limit discussion about politics.
This makes total sense. Please don’t yell at them.
45,000 votes from Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin decided the 2020 election.
This Fall, Democracy is again on the ballot, both on the federal level and in places like Woodbury.
So … Things are crazy.
And I do not doubt that it is about to get crazier.
Why?
Because we’ve allowed political parties to brainwash us into thinking they’re sports teams that you have to cheer for, no matter how bad some of their candidates might be.
And I want to tell you: You do not need to support bad candidates when your team runs them.
When the Mets suck? I don’t watch them either.
Does it mean I like the Mets any less? No!
I love that stupid, miserable, cursed baseball team.
It just means when they offer me a lousy team for the season, I choose not to support them with my time and attention.
Life is short.
Why am I going to waste it watching a bad baseball team?
Life is short.
Why am I going to vote for a bad candidate who will harm me with their policies and positions?
Because they’re wearing the jersey for a team I like? Fuck that.
So, to me, Donald Trump is Jason Bay. (And if you don’t get that reference, that’s ok. All you need to know is that Bay is often rated as one of the worst free agent signings the Mets ever made. I think many Republicans feel the same way about their three times nominated candidate for president.)
Put another way: It doesn’t matter if the politician has a D or an R before their name. You do not have to sanction their buffoonery just because you like the team.
You can still like the Democratic team and vote against bad candidates like Tyler Etzel Jr. and John U. Keleman.
You can still like the Republican team and vote against Donald Trump.
Doing so doesn’t make you a bad Republican.
Doing so doesn’t make you a bad Democrat.
It makes you a smart person.
And we have a shortage of those.
Now, that doesn’t quite solve the Facebook issue though … Which, honestly, is a much larger structural challenge facing millions of Americans and people worldwide. It’s not just here in Southern Orange County.
If the business model for journalism is dead — and it totally is — then people are left with getting their news on Facebook. That includes Facebook Pages and Groups.
And if those groups don’t want to post anything they deem “political,” then that means there’s no news reaching people at all.
The solution, then, is for the people reading this to start not-for-profit news outlets of their own.
The solution is for people reading this to go door to door, make sure everyone is registered to vote, everyone’s got their early mail ballot, and to collect email addresses.
Why email?
Because anyone, anywhere, on Planet Earth can get an email regardless of what kind of device they own. And, with a few key exceptions, email is not filtered out in the way that social media uses algorithms to control what you do and don’t see.
Until that happens in your neighborhood, I’d like to stress that the following three Facebook Groups are available in Southern Orange County.
If you want to get your local news, these are reliable places to go:
Residents of South Blooming Grove ←- South Blooming Grove
(As a fun bonus, I hang out on Woodbury United because there is no official Facebook Page or Group for The Monroe Gazette.)
You should also be on the lookout for bad-faith actors on Facebook, such as these people in our community.
The Second Thing: Monroe’s Tainted Well
Second, I’d like to talk about this misleading — I know. Again — headline in The Photo-News:
Yes. A few residents did speak out against the Village of Monroe’s attempt to use eminent domain to protect their water supply. But that’s not the whole story.
First, because a couple of those residents clearly had an axe to grind.
But second, and more importantly, that’s not the most significant story from that meeting.
The big story was that the Town of Monroe was/is planning to sue the Village of Kiryas Joel.
Why?
Because, according to Supervisor Cardone — meaning it’s probably a lie – he told City of Kiryas Joel Administrator, Gedalya Segedin, not to build a salt shed over Well #4 and its pump intake, and wouldn’t you know it?
That gosh darn rascal Mr. Segedin went ahead and put a salt shed up over the pump intake for Well #4, meaning there could be — and pictures of the map surrounding the area indicate that there is — contamination of part of Monroe’s water supply.
Mr. Segedin denied this was the case in an email sent to Mr. Cardone and others:
To which Supervisor Cardone responded:
Now, I gotta ask you something: What do you think the bigger story is here?
Kiryas Joel Knowingly Contaminates Town of Monroe Water Supply
Or
Residents Speak Out Against Monroe’s Use of Eminent Domain
This is why I tell people that Southern Orange County is a news desert.
Straus News isn’t in the news business; it’s in the advertising business.
The Monroe Gazette is in the news business, which explains why I’m financially running on fumes over here.
But … I didn’t pull this story out of my ass, you know? It’s right here at 1:08:50 in the same video The Photo-News reporter watched to write their story:
Cardone claims he has issued violations, but as mentioned, Cardone lies compulsively.
The Town of Monroe, when asked to provide documentation concerning Well #4 and the violations issued to Kiryas Joel responded to the FOIL with this response:
So, let’s be clear about what’s going on here:
Cardone claimed that Kiryas Joel had put up an illegal salt shed over Well #4 and that he had issued violations to Kiryas Joel about it.
But the Town of Monroe claims there are no documents to suggest this.
The emails I showed you are from a few years ago, meaning Cardone has known about this issue for quite a while. It’s definitely newsworthy when he claims he’s meeting with an attorney, many years later, to sue KJ over something he’s known about for a while.
Specifically, they should be asking: How long did Supervisor Cardone know about this issue? Why did he claim he’s issued violations to KJ about it while the Town says there are no such documents? And why is he only threatening to sue now?
One possible answer is that Supervisor Cardone wanted Hanhallah to support Dorey Houle in her State Senate campaign, and now that they’re not, he’s threatening to sue them.
That brings me to our third and final point today.
In South Blooming Grove, residents have reported that FOIL requests have gone unanswered in over a year.
This week, I am going to begin the process of putting a stop to that shit.
I can’t tell you everything that I have planned.
But I can tell you that I am submitting a new FOIL request that is specific to how much the Village has been spending on the water trucks, and they’re not going to like what happens if and when they ignore it. :-)
We know that South Blooming Grove has lied to the Orange County Health Department about the water being trucked in — claiming it’s stopped while they’re still doing it, by Mr. Stern’s own admission, as recently as last week.
Now it’s time to find out how much they’ve spent, and how they’re paying that bill, for the water they’re not supposed to be trucking in in the first place.
Ok. That’s enough for now. I will return with a longer investigative piece soon.