Elsewhere On The Menu

I seem to recall that one or two opinions of the upcoming contest for Highway Superintendent have already been posted.


So let us now turn our attention to the rest of the ballot.


The powers that be (Ralph and John perhaps) have decided that we shouldn't trouble our pretty little heads worrying about Town Supervisor.


So, for the moment, lets focus on the councilmanic (or is it manic council?) elections.

Incumbents Carlton Levine and Bo Haviland will be facing off against Tim Arone and Marilyn Prestia.

So, what say you?

That Was So Much Fun, Let's Do It Again!

OK, so the results are in, and the winner is...US! 'Cause we get to do it all over again in November.

Rob won the Republican line 253 to 129 (with 5 write-ins, presumeably for the Uncle). He also won the Ind line (That runs to Coney Island, doesn't it?) 12 to 9. Pete won the Conservative line with 21 (there were 6 write-ins, possibly Rick Parry, with an "A").

So, Pete's and Rob's people get to bash each other for another two months.

Who says there's no fun in the 'burbs?

And pay attention Pieman, you Democrats get to vote this time.

Be Sure To Vote (or Not)

Today you get to vote (or not). If you are a Republican or an Ind (Independence? Independents? Indiana? Indubitable?) Party member you can vote for either Pete or Rob. If you are a Conservative Party member you can vote for Pete or whomever. If you are a Democrat, Green, Right To Life, Right To Death, Working Families, Vegetarians For Dolphin Safe Veal or any other Party member, don't forget to stay home.

Polls are open 6 AM 'til 9 PM.

By the way the Board of Elections web site says :"Election Inspectors Needed – Pay $200 for Election Day!"

Who knew you had to pay to do that job?

Cui Bono

Howdy, the Uncle has returned from his wanderings and (YAY) so have Woodbury dirty politics.

As mentioned somewhere below, someone has created a "Do Not Elect Rob Weyant" website.

Gee, wonder whom it could be.

Whomever it is is so proud of his work that he paid Go Daddy extra in order to hide his identity. That way you can be certain that whatever he writes absolutely, positively must be true.

I guess Caruso has graduated from taping stuff to garbage cans and gone right to electronic garbage.

More fun facts about the web site:
If you want to post a comment you have to register (that way they'll know who you are, while making sure you can't see who they are).
And, of course, say the wrong thing about the wrong candidate and your comment will be eveaporated into the ether (where is the ether anyway? I'd love a hit).

More fun stuff to come before election day.

Count on it!

'f Only

Federal case could dissolve Kiryas Joel
Lawsuit claims village violates Constitution
By Chris Mckenna
Times Herald-Record
Published: 2:00 AM - 06/19/11

Kiryas Joel dissidents rolled the ultimate grenade into their enemies' tent last week with a federal lawsuit questioning the very existence of the village that the Satmar Hasidic community created 34 years ago.

Their argument — laid out by civil-rights attorney Michael Sussman and sharply disputed by village leaders and their supporters — is that the village discriminates against them because of religious differences, and that public and religious authority are so entwined in Kiryas Joel that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

But even if the plaintiffs prove they've been thwarted and unfairly treated as they allege, a big question is whether a judge would ever order the drastic remedy they proposed: dismantling the Village of Kiryas Joel.

The answer depends on whom you ask.

Ralph Stein, a Pace Law School professor who teaches constitutional law, sees no chance of that happening, based on what he read in the court complaint.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a political polemic," Stein said. "It doesn't provide a legal basis for which the relief can be provided."

If the allegations are true, Stein said, what the dissidents are complaining about amounts to political corruption no different than Tammany Hall-style tactics, even if cloaked in religious garb. And corruption, he said, is no reason to dismantle a municipality.

If it were, Stein said, "I can't imagine how many times places like Boston, New York and Chicago would have been dissolved."

But Nomi Stolzenberg, a University of Southern California law professor who's co-writing a book on Kiryas Joel, argues that a political in-group abusing power for non-religious reasons is different under constitutional law than a "religious in-group that uses political power to suppress religious dissenters."

"Whether that in fact is what's going on in Kiryas Joel remains to be proved," she said. "But the idea that a religious group could capture political power and abuse its power by discriminating against groups that don't adhere to the beliefs of the dominant group — that is a very specific danger that the religion clauses were designed to combat."

Stolzenberg contends the case could hinge on which of two constitutional readings the judge uses.

The prevailing approach would likely find that the institutions of church and state are separate in Kiryas Joel, and therefore, permissible, she said. But a competing doctrine — she calls it the "get real" approach — might take a less lenient view.

"It's actually hard to predict how the federal judges are going to react to this," she said.

The dissidents' lawsuit tries to show unequal treatment in law enforcement, tax exemptions, elections and other areas through a series of examples. Village leaders say the claims have no merit, and insist they provide services to all residents without discrimination.

Joseph Waldman, a plaintiff in the case and a longtime thorn in the side of the village's leadership, brought a similar case in 1997 to try to get the village dissolved. A federal judge and then an appeals-court panel rejected his demand — but strictly because most of his allegations had just been tried in two previous lawsuits.

The appeals-court judges wrote that Waldman's claims didn't "establish the sort of pervasive and otherwise irremediable entanglement between church and state that would justify a drastic remedy like the dissolution of the village."

But they added: "All this is not to say that a series of future actions evincing an enduring and all-encompassing domination of the Village government by the Congregation could not at some point suffice to create a new cause of action for the dissolution of the village."

cmckenna@th-record.com


city of rajneeshpuram

One of the few precedents for the constitutional challenge Kiryas Joel dissidents have brought against their village is a 1983 case involving Rajneeshpuram, a religious enclave incorporated as a city in Oregon the previous year.

The community started in 1981, when followers of a spiritual leader named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh bought a huge ranch in Wasco County. Within only three years, their commune grew into a city of 7,000 with its own police and fire departments, businesses and bus system.

By that time, the state had sued Rajneeshpuram in federal court, arguing that it had no obligation to recognize the municipal status of a city controlled by a religious organization.

A federal judge ruled in favor of Oregon in 1985. But the decision had little impact on Rajneeshpuram, because state and federal court battles had so depleted the group's resources that the city was soon bankrupt and empty.

A Fun Time Was Had By All

Monroe assessor, KJ condo owners discuss valuations
By Chris Mckenna

KIRYAS JOEL — Property owners whose tax assessments may soon go up streamed into the offices of the Kiryas Joel Community Council on Monday to learn about a change in condominium values that has had broad impact in Kiryas Joel.

For more than two hours, Monroe Assessor Steve Ruelke and his assistant sat with laptops at a kitchen table and chatted one-on-one with each visitor, scrolling through maps and property data as they compared information.

The bottom line, amid all the detailed discussions about condo sizes, rental prices and storage space, was reassuring.

"Our primary purpose here is to gather information," Ruelke clarified at one point. "And we'll make a correction."

The council had requested the informal meeting — the first of two scheduled in Kiryas Joel on Monday — because Ruelke recently altered how condominium values throughout the Town of Monroe are calculated. Instead of basing assessments on the cost of building the units, he's looking at the rental income condo owners earn.

That caused a blizzard of adjustments in Kiryas Joel, where most people live in condos. The owners of more than 1,000 units lucked out with lower values, but nearly 1,800 others wound up with higher assessments. The net result — excluding 110 new units that had no values in 2010 — was an 11 percent increase in condo assessments in the village, according to a spreadsheet Ruelke provided.

Solomon Leimzider was shocked to learn that the values of two rental units he owns had each increased by about 50 percent. He was one of the first owners to sit down with Ruelke on Monday, explaining afterward, "I wanted to understand the basis of his re-evaluation."

But he got even more: He corrected information about the size of his condos and expected lower assessments as a result.

"It looks like he's ready to look into it," he said.

Others faced only modest increases, but came anyway to plead their case and submit a grievance form — the usual method for contesting property-tax values. The Monroe assessment board will review grievances next week.

"It's worth 10, 15 minutes to come down and talk," said one man who gave only his first name, Joel.

Ruelke acknowledges having limited information about Kiryas Joel rents — properties there aren't marketed through the Multiple Listing Service — and promises to lower assessments across the board if shown that typical prices are lower than he assumed.

He said the purpose would be to benefit all condo owners, not just those who file grievances.

"I want there to be equity," Ruelke said. "If we don't do this fairly and equitably, then we have wasted our time."

Keeping Up With Our Congresswoman

Last week Nan Hayworth voted for the Ryan Budget Plan which would end Medicare for those currently under 55 - replacing it with a voucher which future seniors could use towards buying private insurance.

Good idea, bad idea or "let's only talk about Kiryas Joel"?

The Spiritual Self-Deception of Matthew Continetti

Kiryas Joel and the redefinition of ‘poverty’
By Matthew Continetti

Continetti is guest-blogging for The Post.

I can't be the only person who’s absolutely fascinated by this New York Times story on Kiryas Joel, N.Y., the poorest community in the United States. More than 70 percent of Kiryas Joel's residents fall beneath the poverty line — but the social pathologies we typically associate with deprivation are practically nonexistent.

The reason is that Kiryas Joel is populated almost entirely by Hasidic Jews. Here's Timesman Sam Roberts:

Poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

The social workers quoted in the piece seem flummoxed by Kiryas Joel. They realize that the community’s lack of income and its surplus of unusual occupations (i.e., Talmudic scholar) make residents eligible for cash transfers and grants. But the social workers also seem to suggest that the Jews of Kiryas Joel don't deserve welfare benefits because they aren’t, well, miserable.

I e-mailed Hudson Institute scholar Tevi Troy to get his take. “Seems to me that the people of KJ have made a conscious decision to pursue religious fulfillment over wealth pursuit,” Troy wrote back. “In doing so, their community is following a more 19th-century model, with strong community support for poor members of the community, and low tolerance for drugs, crime, or out-of-wedlock childrearing. Our current social service system was not designed with this type of community in mind, which is why some people in the NYT grumbled about social service dollars going to people who appear poor but happy.”

Articles such as Roberts’s lend support to research by Arthur Brooks and Derek Bok. They’ve both shown that, past a certain point, happiness is completely unrelated to income. As you read stories like these, you begin to wonder whether poverty is more a spiritual than economic condition. And if that’s the case, the residents of Kiryas Joel are as rich as Croesus.

The Times Notices KJ

A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place
By SAM ROBERTS

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young.

Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.

The concentration of poverty in Kiryas Joel, (pronounced KIR-yas Jo-EL) is not a deliberate strategy by the leaders of the Satmar sect, said Joel Oberlander, 30, a title examiner who lives in Williamsburg. “It puts a great strain on their resources,” he said. “They would love to see the better earners of the community relocate as well to balance the situation, but why would they?”

Still, the Census Bureau’s latest poverty estimates, based on the 2005-9 American Community Survey released last year, do not take into account the community’s tradition of philanthropy and no-interest loans. Moreover, some families may be eligible for public benefits because they earn low salaries from the religious congregations and other nonprofit groups that run businesses and religious schools. Nearly half of the village’s residents with jobs work for the public or parochial schools.

“If people want to work in a religious setting and make less than they would earn at B & H, that’s a choice people make,” said Gedalye Szegedin, the village administrator, referring to the giant photo and video retail store in Manhattan whose owner and many of whose employees are members of the Satmar sect.

“I don’t want to be judgmental,” Mr. Szegedin added. “I wouldn’t call it a poor community. I would say some are deprived. I would call it a community with a lot of income-related challenges.”

Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants. Mothers can recuperate there for two weeks away from their large families. Rates, which begin at $120 a day, are not covered by Medicaid, although, Mr. Szegedin said, poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones.

One lawmaker, Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, a Republican who represents an adjacent district in Orange County, has demanded an investigation by state officials into why Kiryas Joel received grants for the center. “They may be truly poor on paper,” Ms. Calhoun said. “They are not truly poor in reality.”

The village does aggressively pursue economic opportunities. A kosher poultry slaughterhouse, which processes 40,000 chickens a day, is community owned and considered a nonprofit organization. A bakery that produces 800 pounds of matzo daily is owned by one of the village’s synagogues.

Most children attend religious schools, but transportation and textbooks are publicly financed. Several hundred handicapped students are educated by the village’s own public school district, which, because virtually all the students are poor and disabled, is eligible for sizable state and federal government grants.

Statistically, no place comes close to Kiryas Joel. In Athens, Ohio, which ranks second in poverty, 56 percent of the residents are classified as poor.

Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

“I cannot say as a group that they are cheating the system,” said William B. Helmreich, a sociology professor who specializes in Judaic studies at City College of the City University of New York, “but I do think that they have, no pun intended, unorthodox methods of getting financial support.”

All of which prompts a fundamental question: Are as many as 7 in 10 Kiryas Joel residents really poor?

“It is, in a sense, a statistical anomaly,” Professor Helmreich said. “They are clearly not wealthy, and they do have a lot of children. They spend whatever discretionary income they have on clothing, food and baby carriages. They don’t belong to country clubs or go to movies or go on trips to Aruba.

“They’re not scrounging around, though. They’re not presenting a picture of poverty as if you would go to a Mexican neighborhood in Corona. They do have organizations that lend money interest-free. They’re also supported by members of the community who are wealthier — it’s not declarable income if somebody buys them a baby carriage.”

David Jolly, the social services commissioner for Orange County, also said that while the number of people receiving benefits seemed disproportionately high, the number of caseloads — a family considered as a unit — was much less aberrant. A family of eight who reports as much as $48,156 in income is still eligible for food stamps, although the threshold for cash assistance ($37,010), which relatively few village residents receive, is lower.

Joel Steinberg, who lives in the village with his family and works as a comptroller for a real estate firm, said that before Passover, “the No. 1 project in the community was raising funds for food.”

Mr. Steinberg recalled encountering a neighbor soliciting help door-to-door last fall: “He had received two shut-off notices from his utility company, he’s behind with tuition and that his food stamps gets used up before the end of the month. He’s paying too much for transportation to his job, and he had had an unexpected expense that forced him into debt.”

William E. Rapfogel, chief executive of the Metropolitan Jewish Council on Poverty, said, “Sure, there are probably people taking advantage and people in the underground economy getting benefits they’re not entitled to, but there are also a lot of poor people.”

Mr. Szegedin, the village administrator, said critics tended to forget that state taxpayers were generally spared because thousands of village children are enrolled in religious schools. Nearby, the Monroe-Woodbury school district, with roughly the same school-age population, spends about $150 million annually, about one-third of which comes from the state. (Albany provides about $5 million of Kiryas Joel’s $16 million public school budget.)

“You also have no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we’re not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you’re not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy,” he said. “I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s a wash.”

Pipeline Greenlighted

The New York State Court Appelate Division has denied an appeal by Woodbury and Harriman to reopen their lawsuit against the KJ Pipeline.

This appears to open the way for construction to begin.

Now what?