Something Incredibly Stupid Has Happened In South Blooming Grove

Due to gross incompetence, the Village of South Blooming Grove — technically speaking — does not have a mayor, rendering all decisions since March null and void.

Well … I WAS in the middle of a local news round-up. You can read the first part here. That was published on Thursday. On Friday, when I sat down to finish the round-up, I made the mistake of watching the December 20th, 2024, South Blooming Grove Village Planning Board meeting live. Usually, I’ll wait a couple of days to view these things so that I don’t spend the next 24-48 hours rage-screaming at the cats.

This was the first of the now regularly scheduled 10 am Friday morning Village Planning Board meetings that I was telling you about. (And, for the record, yes. While it may not be morally or ethically right to do so, legally, a municipal body in New York can hold a meeting whenever they want. If you have a problem with this, and I hope you do, you should go down to the offices of Assemblyman Brian Maher, Assemblyman Chris Eachus, Assemblyman Brabrenec, and State Senator Skoufis and refuse to leave until they introduce legislation to update the Open Meetings Law to prevent this scheduling malfeasance from happening.)

Ok. Maybe don’t take it that far, but if you’re pissed about this — and I know a lot of you are — I’m going to ask you a very simple question:

What are you going to do about it?

Because the correct answer is that you organize, you ensure everyone in your group is registered to vote. And you start looking for people to run against each one of the above-identified individuals unless they make this change. It’s no different than what our Haredi brothers and sisters do. If half of the people I see out there saying stuff like “They always get what they want” bothered to register to vote, joined a local group, knocked on doors to register their friends and neighbors, and found & funded opponents for the people I just named, you’d see shit change around here real fast. You just have to do it, not talk about it on Facebook.

And I mean now, too. Not later. Not when there’s an election coming in a few months. I heard that lazy bullshit over in Woodbury recently and let me tell you, if that’s your attitude, I hope you enjoy two more years of James Freiband, Matthew Fabbro, and Kathryn Luciani.

Because if you only organize and get active when there’s an election, you’re going to continue to lose ground to the wealthy, the corporations, and their useful idiots like the three people I just named. Waiting for an election to come is the dumbest shit, and yet people continue to make that mistake over and over and over. Then you get bad elected officials and people go, “Man. If only enough people came out to vote.”

Well that shit is on you dude. You didn’t do the work.

Organizing and registering people to vote, right now, is something everyone has to do a little bit of at every opportunity that they get. Those elections come faster than you think. The Working Families Party already put out their questionnaire for endorsements for November 2025, and 2024 isn’t even over yet.

I’ll have a much longer story about what happened at the December 20th Village Planning Board meeting soon. I like to get comments from the parties involved, and I think it’d be really good to hear from the New York State Board of Elections on this one.

So, this week, the odds are good that News 12 will run this story before I do. I just wanted to break the story first because that’s my job. It doesn’t pay well. Everyone wants journalists to hold powerful people accountable until you write about one of their friends—Hey, it’s not my fault she posted a video of herself marching on the Capital on January 6th—and then they get pissy and say stuff like “You’re losing credibility!” So I guess it’s only a desire to hold people accountable that you don’t like? Cool. Duly noted.

Here’s What’s Happening in South Blooming Grove

Back in 2021, when South Blooming Grove’s de facto mayor, Joel Stern, took control of the village through his meat puppet, George Kalaj, he changed the term in office from two years to four years.

There’s just one problem.

Because Mr. Stern and Mr. Isaac Ekstein (pictured above using two distinct smartphones, both of which I just put a FOIL in concerning who he was texting during the December 20th, 2024 meeting) are idiots, they never filed the paperwork with New York State. (And I want to stress this point: Stern and Ekstein are not evil geniuses. They have money. They have votes. You might not be able to beat them on the money front, but you can absolutely beat them on the vote front if you got organized.)

Someone told Stern & Ekstein of this mistake, thee years later, and the paperwork to change the time in office was only submitted late in November of 2024 by Village Clerk, Kerry Dougherty. A person who routinely claims not to get important emails from anyone. Maybe she lost this one too? Yeah, I’m not buying it.

So, yes. Stern, Kalaj, and Ekstein pushed through the change a few years ago, but it was submitted to New York State just last month. Because they submitted the paperwork in November 2024, the change from a two-year term to a four-year term for Fake Mayor George Kalaj never happened.

What does that mean?

This means South Blooming Grove was supposed to hold a village election for mayor in March of this year. Nobody at Orange County bothered to get involved because, as I was told directly by the Orange County Board of Elections, they have no involvement in the Village of South Blooming Grove elections. (Crooked Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus likes to give South Blooming Grove a free pass to do whatever Stern wants. Why? Well, wouldn’t you know it, but Dobby the House Elf is on the ballot in November of 2025, too.)

So, March 2024 came and went, and there was no mayoral election.

No mayoral election, no mayor. No mayor, no village board or planning board. You follow?

In short, most — if not all — decisions made by both the Village Planning Board and the Village Board since March of 2024 — including ramming through Joel Stern’s financial backer, Avraham Bur Jakobowitz’s housing development on Capital Hill — are null and void.

Mr. Ekstein was told this multiple times on December 20th by local attorney Susan Shapiro. Someone whose name you’re going to be hearing a lot of very soon, and his response was to smile and laugh at the residents and the attorney.

Now, listen. I’m sure the New York State Democrats are, once again, going to come to the rescue of Mr. Stern and Mr. Ekstein. We’ve seen that with the DEC with Clovewood and Prospect Gardens. We’ve seen it with the DOH. We’ve even seen it with the DOT. So, you can 100% expect some bullshit excuse to be made that will allow for Mr. Stern and Mr. Ekstein to continue doing what they’re doing at your expense.

Unless you want to do something about it.

Until then, you know who Ekstein and Skoufis are laughing about in this photo?

It’s you.

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I’ll return with our regularly scheduled news round-up on Monday or Tuesday. There are two things in it that I need to fact-check. One of which involves Woodbury Town Councilman Brandon Calore and his poor behavior during a person’s job interview for a municipal government position being blamed on his ADHD.

This is the same dude who told a former co-worker over in the Town of Cornwall, “If you do that again, I’ll rip you out of the truck and kick the shit out of you.” I wonder if he blamed his ADHD for that threat of physical violence too?

After Christmas, we’ll be back with more on this specific South Blooming Grove fiasco. By then, I hope to have comments from New York State’s Department of State and Board of Elections to share with you. I also contacted Mr. Ekstein to ask why he thought this was a situation to laugh at.