Next spring, if all goes according to plan, voters in the Town of Crawford will be asked if they approve of the creation of a village, drawn to match exactly the boundaries of the town, and subsequently consolidate the two municipalities.

Should it be approved, the village will exist only on paper, its sole purpose being to block any other village from being incorporated in the town.

The town supervisor and entire town board, all Republicans, support the effort, which is outlined in a voter-initiated petition now making the rounds in town. In a post on the town’s website, Supervisor Charles Carnes emphasizes the town-village consolidation as a way to protect community values “including open space and strict zoning that were outlined in the Town of Crawford master plan” and to control taxes. In a phone interview this week, he said he couldn’t think of a downside to the plan.

Democrats are on board, too. In an email, Kelly Alday, chair of the town Democratic committee, wrote that the committee “is in full support of the coterminous plan and have been helping to collect signatures for the last several months.

No one in the slim crowd that attended an informational meeting on the proposal last week offered any objections.

Not The First

Crawford would be joining a growing list of such consolidated village/town arrangements — at least six others already exist. But unlike villages of old that were created to provide its residents with some service, the new villages are designed to protect the status quo, and in some cases drag religion, race and economics into the equation, says Lisa K. Parshall, a professor of political science at Daemen College in Amherst, New York.

On September 16, a small crowd gathered in the Senior Citizens Center next to Town Hall for the chance to ask Marissa Weiss, an attorney with a law firm that crafted the petition, questions about the proposal. Weiss, who practices at Jacobowitz and Gubits, LLP, said the Crawford proposal is nearly identical to the village/town consolidation approved not long ago by voters in the Town of Tuxedo.

In Tuxedo, voters were worried that a long-stalled 1,200-home subdivision aimed at commuters would eventually get built, creating the kind of density that could lend itself to incorporating as a village with regulations at odds with the town. But no such development is contemplated for Crawford, and Carnes said recently that nobody has proposed creating a village in the 20 years he’s been supervisor.

Last year, the town did propose the creation of a new zone to permit the construction of a modest 54-unit apartment complex on surplus Pine Bush Water District property that the town had been trying to unload for a decade. In August 2020, the town board voted unanimously against the zoning change, but emphasized that the decision was not influenced by ugly anti-Semitic rants on social media but rather worries about traffic and safety at an intersection near two Pine Bush district schools. Nonetheless, the proposed apartments spurred interest in the consolidated village plan that had been talked about since 2017, the year Crawford updated its master plan, Carnes said.

It’s no secret that the emergence of a significant Hasidic population in the lower Hudson Valley has people on edge.

That same year, 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed legislation that would have allowed school districts to carve themselves into wards, saying that “the bill does not provide adequate protections to guard against disenfranchisement or discrimination against citizens or groups of citizens.” Pine Bush had discussed instituting a ward system, but opponents saw it as a way to marginalize the Hasidim moving into Bloomingburg, a village at the western end of the sprawling school district.

Perhaps coincidentally, in January 2017, the Town of Mamakating unveiled a map of a ward system its voters approved in 2015. One of the wards was concentrated around Bloomingburg, thereby limiting the influence of the growing Hasidic population to a single seat on the town board and perhaps the supervisor, still elected at large, a longtime political veteran in the area said recently.

Growth Stalls

After a growth spurt that saw Crawford’s population increase by just shy of 3,000 to 9,316 between 1990 and 2010, the results of the 2020 census revealed that the boom had stalled. The town’s population slid by 186 to 9,130, a drop of two percent. Furthermore, the town’s overall population is getting older and the percentage of people in the youngest cohorts is declining. Carnes noted the new population figures during a town board meeting held the same night as the informational meeting on the village. Carnes also said he was encouraged by a recent uptick in home construction. It is true that through August the building department had issued 15 permits for single-family homes, up from seven issued in the same time period during last year’s pandemic-ravaged economy. Those numbers are meager compared with the nearly 150 permits issued for single-family and multi-unit residences in 2002, said John Calaca, referring to the year he became the town’s building inspector. Orange County, however, has continued to grow, to 401,310 in 2020 from 372,813 in 2010.

The status quo that a consolidated village/town could perpetuate is a town overwhelmingly zoned for single-family residential or residential-agricultural uses. During the informational meeting, Weiss confirmed a comment regarding zoning made by Rory Holmes, a town board member and one-time planning board member. Yes, she said, an old-style village could indeed enact its own zoning code and that could include high-density housing. When the town was entertaining the plan for the 54-unit apartment complex, RJ Smith, a longtime real estate broker in town, made the point that not everybody can afford a house costing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lot of at least two-and-a-half acres. Crawford’s housing situation was freezing young people, recently married people, out of the market, he said. Alday, the Democratic chair, did say that the local party’s platform will address housing and zoning, although she was not yet in a position to reveal details.

Crawford’s Character

The cover letter of the updated comprehensive plan states: “The Town of Crawford envisions the creation of a mixed-use, environmentally friendly, walkable community integrated within the historic framework of Pine Bush and taking advantage of the rich agricultural environment.”

It is a lengthy document, but the introduction addresses the declining population, worries about the future of Crawford’s rural character and small town feel, and the need for a population with enough disposable income to support local business.

Carnes said that shortly after the updated plan was released, he met with Holmes and Rob Sassi, a former town board member who now represents Crawford in the Orange County Legislature. He also consulted Democratic State Senator James Skoufis and Republican Assemblyman Colin Schmitt, who introduced legislation to increase the minimum population for a proposed village to 2,000 from 500, and the percentage of prospective villagers needed to petition to form a village to 51 percent from 20 percent. As things stand, Schmitt said at the time, it’s too simple to create villages.

After Carnes decided that a consolidated village/town arrangement was in the best interest of Crawford, he called together a like-minded group of townspeople to get the ball rolling. Village petition drives must be voter driven, elected town officials can encourage and facilitate the drive, but can’t initiate the drive. Any “duly qualified voter of New York State” living in the town, however, can circulate petitions. In Crawford’s case the wording of the petition was put together by Jacobowitz and Gubits, LLP.

Schmitt’s village legislation hasn’t gotten anywhere yet, so Crawford’s petitioners must collect roughly 1,250 signatures, or 20 percent of voters registered for the 2020 elections. Petitioners then present the completed forms to the town clerk, who must vet the signatures. Town clerk Jessica Kempter has not yet received any petitions, but says she’s been told that the minimum number of signatures has already been exceeded. After the signatures are vetted, a public hearing will be held for the sole purpose of making sure the petitions meet the statutory requirements. Once that’s done according to procedures mostly involving timing, another public hearing will be held followed by the referendum on the creation of the village and its consolidation with the town. Extensive details on many other steps are available on the town’s website.

Villages, Villages

New York has hundreds of villages created and some dissolved under rules that have changed over nearly two centuries. Schmitt’s position that villages are too easy to create and get rid of rings true with Parshall, the public policy professor who is also a fellow at the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government, a public policy think tank. Last year, the institute published Parshall’s comprehensive report that asked, “Is It Time For New York State to Revise Its Village Incorporation Laws?” She looked at villages across the United States, including many in New York, and some in light of the rising population of Hasidim in the lower Hudson Valley. “I understand the non-ultra-orthodox perspective,” she said this week in a telephone call, while condemning the anti-Semitic hate speech that sometimes accompanies local development issues.

New York villages do come and go based on nothing more than local initiatives. Noting controversies, Parshall wrote, “The questions surrounding village incorporation are complex but the scope of review required by New York is not. Relying solely on population and territorial requirements reflects an antiquated mentality conceived in an era of horses and buggies...”

She continued, “Rather, village incorporations reflect competing community desires for control over development and zoning decisions, the promotion of self-interests, a competition for political power, and for control of the preservation or development of a community’s residential character. The creation of new village governments has an impact on adjacent or embracing communities who, under New York’s laws, are largely left out of the incorporation equation.”

As one example, Parshall looked at an effort in the Town of Greenburgh in Westchester to create the village of Edgemont, and the political and legal battles surrounding the proposal. The pro-village contingent sees the preservation of services, property values and zoning regulations under the banner of self-determination. The opponents see an “affluent area taking away a significant portion of the town’s tax base” and a desire to shed costs associated with “lower socioeconomic areas of town.”

The existing coterminous, consolidated village/town municipalities tend to have median household incomes well above the state average. Scarsdale, an extreme example, checks in at $250,000, against the state average of $68,468 measured in 2019 dollars. Crawford’s median household income is $84,665, above both New York’s and Orange County’s $79,944. Of course, not all are affluent. East Rochester households in upstate NY come in at $50,824, and Green Island, near Albany, at $55,104. The consolidated municipalities are also likely to be very white: Green Island is 90.3 percent white, and Scarsdale, 79.2 percent. Crawford is 87.8 percent white. They have lower poverty rates. Crawford’s in that group as well with a poverty rate of 8.1, well below Orange County’s rate 12.3 percent.

Whether Crawford’s proposal to follow suit is good governance in the making or extreme NIMBYism remains to be seen. But if New York isn’t keen on overseeing the process, the job falls to the townspeople.

Gail Jeter is running against Rob Sassi to represent District 18 — Crawford and Wallkill — in the Orange County Legislature. Jeter is running on the Democratic line, and although is a former chair of Crawford’s Democratic Committee, she is careful not to speak for the party. When asked if she had a stand on the petition for the village/town plan, she simply said: “Be careful what you sign.”