Court dismisses the collusive lawsuit and calls out individuals for brushing “dangerously close” to sanctions.
As you may recall from last summer, anti-incorporation petition objectors sued Town Supervisor Paul Feiner for rejecting the incorporation petition for the wrong reasons. The move was bizarre, collusive, and an obvious delay tactic. For background on this topic, click here to read: Anti-incorporation people are now suing Paul Feiner over the petition, too.
That case was just dismissed as "moot."
Key highlights of today’s court ruling follow (emphasis added):
...this Court is not in the business of expending limited judicial resources to satisfy the unreasonable desires of parties who got what they wanted, but did not get it the way that they wanted it.
Therefore, although the petitioners and respondent [Janet] Linn have opposed the intervenor/respondents’ mootness argument, and have thereby urged this Court to now again consider the legality of the challenged decision rendered by respondent Feiner to deny the Incorporation Petition upon the sole ground that they have raised, despite their appreciation of the fact that this Court has already reversed, vacated and annulled that very challenged decision upon other grounds which they did not raise, brushes dangerously close to the sanctionable dogged pursuit of litigation for purposes which are other than the legitimate challenge to governmental action permitted pursuant to article 78 of the CPLR.
Click here to read the decision.
The Town's illegal spending of taxpayer funds, hiring of private investigators, secret attempts to change laws, and meritless rejection of a valid petition, all beg one key question: How far will the Town and the opposition go to keep Edgemont from voting on its preferred form of self-governance?
And now that the Court has issued a clear warning that this collusive litigation was “dangerously close to sanctionable,” we must ask another question: if not for “legitimate” purposes, why did the named respondent so doggedly pursue this litigation?
Will the petitioners and named respondent continue this “dogged” litigation by appealing?
Stay tuned.
