With absurd reasoning, Feiner again denies Edgemont its right to vote.
Yesterday, Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner rejected the EIC’s second petition to hold a vote on whether Edgemont should incorporate into Greenburgh’s 7th village. This isn’t surprising given his anti-incorporation bias and actions to dupe potential voters, attempts to change incorporation laws, and support for a moratorium on new villages.
Here, Mr. Feiner again used his limited ministerial authority to adopt extreme and nonsensical interpretations of New York State law. In doing so, he is blocking his own constituents from voting on their preferred form of self-governance, a troubling development for the 43,000 unincorporated area residents who pay the majority of Town taxes but represent a minority of the Town-wide electorate.
In Mr. Feiner’s reading of the law, unincorporated Greenburgh petitioners seeking an incorporation referendum must meet impossible hurdles:
They must conduct a door-to-door census to establish a list of regular habitants (LORI) and include minors, even if their parents do not consent to sharing that information. But, if any individual person refuses the information, the entire petition would be invalid. That requirement prevents the whole community from voting if a single (i.e. anti-incorporation) person doesn’t cooperate—unless, of course, the petitioners obtained the information against the will of their neighbors.
Even if every resident was home and miraculously provided the information on the spot to the army of doorbell-ringers, the LORI would have to be developed in a window of time during which no one could move in or out, have a child, or die. Even if one could accomplish such a task, it’s unclear as to whether Mr. Feiner would require that window to extend to the signature-gathering period.
Specifically for Edgemont:
Mr. Feiner demands a new set of boundaries for the Greenville Fire District even though the County, the Town, and the district itself have used the existing one for nearly 100 years for various essential municipal purposes including property taxation, elections, and delivery of services.
The petitioners, despite signing a document in support of an election (many for a second time), must somehow personally convince Mr. Feiner that their sentiment hasn’t changed. In his rejection, Mr. Feiner speculated, based on his own personal feelings (and thankfully, this time, not with the use of taxpayer financed private investigators), that community sentiment in Edgemont has changed meaningfully since the gathering of signatures in 2017 such that many petition-signers no longer support even a vote on the matter. His reasons are 1) there’s a new Town Board member; 2) an anti-incorporation website with less than 100 supporters (none of whom signed the second petition) was created; and 3) the Town has paved some roads in Edgemont since 2017.
Feiner conveniently ignored the fact that not a single petition-signer, out of 1700+, ever contacted the EIC to have his or her name removed from the petition--even after the EIC sent a community-wide mailing indicating that it was getting ready to file a second petition, and followed up with an email specifically asking people to contact the EIC if they wanted their name removed. In other words, Mr. Feiner unilaterally invalidated over a thousand people's signatures without ever asking them whether they wished to retract them.
Were the petitioners that advocated for New York’s 550 already-incorporated villages subjected to such extreme readings of the law by their town supervisors? We doubt it. Unfortunately, rather than acting in a ministerial capacity as is required of him, Mr. Feiner has stopped at nothing to prevent an election that may be unfavorable to him. This sort of behavior is undemocratic and leaves underrepresented residents of Greenburgh’s unincorporated communities unable to effect change.
We are evaluating options for next steps and will keep you informed. Thanks for your ongoing support.
-The EIC
