Satmar Hasidim living in an area that wasn’t included in a recent expansion of Kiryas Joel hope to create their own village, but opposition from various corners could change that. In a twist for these kinds of disputes, those opposed to the new village include not just non-Haredi neighbors, but some Hasidim, as well.

The Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel launched in 1977 with 320 acres, and has since undergone a number of expansions, most recently in 2017, when it negotiated an upgrade from a village to a town called Palm Tree, bringing its size to about 950 acres. As part of the expansion agreement, Kiryas Joel leaders signed a contract with a group of non-Haredi individuals who live nearby, United Monroe, stating that they would not bring forward or endorse any land annexation requests for 10 years. Now, local Satmar residents left out of that arrangement are trying to form their own village.

Their efforts to form a village, called Seven Springs, first came together in a petition in 2018, a year after the settlement between United Monroe and Kiryas Joel leadership. They seek 1,216 acres of residential and undeveloped space, unincorporated land along the southern and western borders of Kiryas Joel. Intended as its own village that would remain part of the town of Monroe, Seven Springs, would control its own land-use rules, while relying on Monroe for such services and facilities as highways, fire protection, and utilities.

The 2018 announcement drew immediate opposition from United Monroe.

John Allegro, then a member of United Monroe's executive committee, told The Times Herald-Record at the time that any attempt to incorporate a village would disrupt the agreement his group reached with Kiryas Joel leaders. "I think it would be a detriment to community relations, and the steps we took when we negotiated this settlement," he said. However, as the Seven Springs petitioners live outside Kiryas Joel and do not belong to its leadership, they are not subject to the agreement’s terms.

Since then, the Seven Springs petition has undergone multiple revisions, including a request for more land to the proposed village, and faced obstacles on numerous fronts. In order to pass, the petition must receive a majority of votes from residents of the proposed village area – rather than residents of the entire town of Monroe – an outcome all but guaranteed if the petition goes to referendum. But Monroe’s government delayed consideration of the petition multiple times. Herman Wagschal, a developer and one of the lead Seven Springs petitioners, sued Monroe for stalling, winning the case at trial and on appeal, a process that took four years.

Meanwhile, Kiryas Joel decided to break their agreement with United Monroe, butting heads with Seven Springs in the process. In 2019, Gedalye Szegedin, Kiryas Joel’s administrator, filed his own petition to expand the town of Kiryas Joel, a sudden move that competed with the plan for Seven Springs. Szegedin completed his filing the same day that Wagschal attempted to revise his petition. Wagschal was allegedly attacked in the town hall parking lot while trying to file his revision.

The incident occurred on March 28 of that year, when Szegedin emailed Monroe’s supervisor a request to expand Kiryas Joel, as opposed to forming a new village, by annexing 70 acres that overlap with land sought by Wagschal for Seven Springs. Within minutes, Wagschal approached Monroe’s town hall with a third revision of the Seven Springs proposal in hand. Before Wagschal could enter the building, The Times Herald-Record reported, two Hasidic men “who apparently objected to his petition jumped and beat him, and one grabbed the petition and drove away.” Wagschal and a Monroe administrator described the attack in court filings. Wagschal successfully submitted the petition the following day, but a decision about Seven Springs was nonetheless delayed in court for four years.

The status of the petition for Seven Springs is currently in limbo, as the Town of Monroe has not held a referendum on it, and has not indicated that it has any plans to do so.

Another consideration is proposed revisions to New York State’s village law, which allows new villages to be formed without an environmental review or a test confirming it serves the “overall public interest.” According to the current statute, only 500 residents must live in a given area in order for that area to be considered for village incorporation. United Monroe says the modest residency requirement “encourages abuse for the purposes of over development, or worse, to exclude others based on socio-ecoomic status.”

The Seven Springs effort has become so controversial that the New York State legislature passed a bill specifically meant to make projects like this – the proposed village of Ateres being just the latest example – harder to pull off. In June, the legislature passed a bill sponsored by James Skoufis, a State Senator whose district includes Monroe and Kiryas Joel, that would increase the number of residents required to create a new village by four times, to 2,000. The legislation would also require that a study be conducted on the fiscal, service, and taxation impacts on the residents of the proposed village and surrounding town.

Attempts to create new villages and efforts opposing them have created controversy in non-Haredi neighborhoods as well. Joining Skoufis in attempting to amend the state’s village law is Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who sponsored a similar bill that passed the legislature in June after people in Greenburgh, a town in her district, agitated to form their own village. Based on an analysis Stewart-Cousins commissioned from Pace University Law School, her bill would establish a three-member statewide commission to evaluate village petitions.

Stewart-Cousins’ and Skoufis’ bills were each sponsored in the Assembly by Fred Thiele of Long Island, whose district has seen a few failed village incorporations in the past few decades. Thiele argued that more government scrutiny should be applied to petitions for new villages, much as it is to requests for forming new counties or even “water districts.”

Having passed in both chambers in the recent legislative session, the bills await the governor’s signature before they would become law.