News That Matters

Excerpted from News That Matters, July 6, 2009

Is There No Balm in Gilead?

What would you do if you woke up one morning to discover that the explosion and shaking and scattering of rock falling from the sky wasn’t the Rapture but a well connected developer blasting away on three sides of your house?

This is not some make-believe scenario, but a real situation that has been plaguing Carmel resident Lori Kemp and will into the future.

Surrounded on three sides by Pulte Homes’ “The Retreat” her life has been turned into a living nightmare for the past couple of years and will continue on for quite some time.

Bulldozing, blasting, rock ‘scraping’, grading and all of it often as close as 50′ to her 1890 home that sits next to the Gilead cemetery which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Now the cemetery and the home are separated by a blasted out gulf of stagnant water and invasive reeds where an old farm lane used to be. And the hill that use to rise to her south is slowly being removed. Rock by rock. Ledge by ledge. Piece by piece. Slowly. Day in and day out. Week after week and month after agonizing month.

Can you imagine what it must be like living surrounded by all that? Have you ever heard a rock drill run for hours or the sound a bulldozer makes as it tries to scrape chunks of ledge away? Now imagine that every day – all day.

What do you do when your town building inspector doesn’t seem to care? When the DEC throws up roadblocks and hurdles too high for the average person to leap over? What happens when you are forced to defend yourself in a court that gives you conflicting information – and you’re not an attorney? What happens when your house physically moves with each blast of the bedrock that underlays it and pieces of that tortured and blasted rock rain down on your property covering everything with lung clogging dust? When a property line dispute turns into a protracted Kafkaesque journey?

These are not rhetorical questions for Ms. Kemp. They are the life she lives each and every day.

I’ve written about this many times before and the NYJN used to (until Pulte Homes started advertising in that paper perhaps?) cover on a regular basis but the story is now relegated to obscurity. But the hell she lives continues on and not only does government not seem to care, they are, to put it mildly, completely unconcerned about the welfare and safety of a resident while bending over backwards to accommodate an out-of-county developer.

I’m not talking corruption or conspiracy or malfeasance for those are words best used in a court of law, assuming one could find one in this county clear of the influence of the criminal acts being perpetrated against a fellow citizen. But I am talking about a situation that everyone knows exists and feels powerless to alter, change or influence and that may only be corrected if the unthinkable happens at the Kemp home.

What’s going on down in Carmel is not unique and if the economy doesn’t finally kill Patterson Crossing this is a situation that will occur at the Lake Carmel community when another verdant Putnam County hillside is reduced to shit for political gain and profit, leaving the rest of us to pay for its way.

So be aware. Look around. Who serves on your town boards and how are they connected to the people who force these things upon us? Do they actively and progressively defend you or do they sit passively claiming their hands are tied?

Watch closely who funds and otherwise backs their election campaigns this season and what out-of-county entities get themselves involved, even remotely, even distantly, even with just a whispered word to the ‘right’ officials…

It’s your county. Let’s take it back from the forces that work against us.

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