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Village Board has Solution in Hand
Dear Editor:
State Assemblyperson Sandra Galef has responded to the needs of our Cold Spring Village Home Rule with her sponsorship of legislation, which has been passed, requiring training for municipal boards in the areas of zoning and planning.
This legislation is important because if such training had been available earlier in Cold Spring, our Mayor, hopefully, would not have defied our Village Code, Master Plan, and National and State Historic guidelines and rezoned our Waterfront to permit the presently approved horror construction of ten condos on a scant half-acre of land, on our already overcrowded Waterfront at the site of the former lumberyard, the ten condos in place of either a park or appropriate structures to accommodate our Village. Nor would our Planning Board have approved the granting of a permit to build at this site at the very same time this site of migrating pollution was undergoing remediation. Nor would we ever have had the present problem of the Nozzleman lawsuit against the Village, with regard to the site of the former Marathon Battery, since the Nozzleman and lumberyard situations are closely connected to one another.
In order to remedy the disastrous situation resulting from the illegal zoning by the Mayor, all the Village Board needs to do, and must do, is to institute eminent domain. This can be used at the Nozzleman Marathon Battery site. This can also be used at the lumberyard Waterfront site. The Village Board can do this under the New York State Constitution, which supersedes all other law. The Constitution, Article IX Section 1, Subdivision (e), gives the Village, and indeed all "local governments," the "power to take by eminent domain private property within their boundaries for public use." No referendum, and no permission, is needed.
Why isn't the Village Board acting when the solution is at hand?
Phyllis L. Pustilnik Seymour W Pustilnik
Cold Spring
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