Why We Need Neighborhood Wards In Ramapo Ramapo’s desperate financial situation demonstrates why we need a town board elected by independent districts or wards. If our rubber stamp town board were replaced by representatives elected from individual districts we would not now have a town board giving tax breaks to Supervisor St. Lawrence’s friends for luxury housing in Suffern. As our town’s costs have skyrocketed St. Lawrence has limited tax increases by borrowing more and more money. We are fortunate that there has been a dramatic decline in interest rates. This has allowed St. Lawrence to refinance our town debt. But in order to borrow St. Lawrence has had to exaggerate future town revenues. Lying to the public is perfectly legal, but lying to the purchasers of municipal debt is fraud. Nothing seems to discourage Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence. Even though he knows that both the FBI and the SEC are investigating Ramapo finances he is still “cooking” Ramapo’s books. St. Lawrence’s creative accounting techniques involve both Ramapo and the Ramapo Local Development Corporation (LDC). It is important to note that because Ramapo guarantees all of the debt of the LDC it doesn’t matter to our tax payers where he hides the peanut in his financial shell game. St. Lawrence is both the supervisor of Ramapo and his own director of finance. He has imposed an illegal gag order on his entire staff. But despite his best efforts Preserve Ramapo has learned a great deal about his irresponsible financial decisions and financial manipulations. Melissa Reimer, Ramapo’s former head of finance is a truly heroic whistle blower who is exposing St. Lawrence’s financial manipulation. Melissa is now the reluctant participant in two Ramapo lawsuits. The first is her slander and libel lawsuit against St. Lawrence, other members of his administration and the town of Ramapo. The second is against her permanent suspension on spurious charges cooked up by St. Lawrence. Unfortunately for St. Lawrence she spent two years tape recording her conversations with town officials before her suspension and turned these over to the FBI. Documents and computer hard disks supporting her charges against St. Lawrence were seized by the FBI in it famous raid on Ramapo town hall on May 15th, 2013 St. Lawrence has not made it easy for outsiders to follow his desperate attempt to hide Ramapo’s financial situation. Preserve Ramapo is now involved in a careful analysis of these actions. In the meantime we can still describe what he has done in a general way. Excluding the police tax line, most of Ramapo’s expenses should properly be charged under Ramapo’s general tax line but St. Lawrence doesn’t want to embarrass himself by presenting our taxpayers with a huge tax increase on this tax line. His creative solution is to bury town expenses in other tax lines including the Ramapo lighting district and paramedic/ambulance services. He also “borrowed” $3 million from the police tax line. St. Lawrence’s single largest embarrassment is the Ramapo Local Development Corporation (LDC). The LDC owns a huge white elephant known as the Provident Bank Stadium. The stadium which St. Lawrence told us was going to be an amazing success is losing $3 million a year. While the stadium has a substantial operating loss, most of its loss is due to the lack of revenue needed to repay the capital and interest charges on the $60 million in bonded debt used to build the stadium. St. Lawrence is also hiding substantial loses in his other prized project, the Elm Street “affordable” housing project. He claims this housing project which is still under construction has an unrealized net worth of $15 million. What we do not know is how much it will cost to complete this project or how much St. Lawrence will be able to sell these apartments for. We already know that almost none of the completed “affordable” apartments have been sold to local residents and that most of them have been sold illegally to limited liability corporations whose owners reside outside Rockland. In effect Ramapo is the sponsor of a commercial venture that has used our taxes to benefit landlords who are now renting these apartments to outsiders. It is now more than 16 months since the FBI raid on Ramapo town hall. People keep asking us when the indictments will arrive. We believe that when indictments are finally issued they will involve a large number of individuals and will be complex. But we can’t wait for the FBI to fix our town. Ramapo is one of the largest and most diverse towns in New York State. Unfortunately a bullet vote from just one part of Ramapo has meant that the leaders of that part of town and a small group of developers control Ramapo. Two years ago thousands of our registered voters signed two petitions The first is create a ward system and the second to create six single member wards or election districts. A team of Ramapo lawyers fought two years to prevent a town wide referendum on these proposals. They lost. Our residents will finally be able to vote in a town wide referendum scheduled for September 30th. If we prevail Ramapo will have six independent election districts. This means that instead of a board made up of three “yes” men and one “yes” woman we will have a board of six individuals each of whom will be responsible to the voters in a specific Ramapo neighborhood. Every part of Ramapo deserves representation on our town board. We need a town that is good for all of us. That is what it means to live in a democracy. Robert I. Rhodes, Chairman, Preserve Ramapo
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 12:48:21 +0000
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