Southampton Village Trustee Kimberley Allan is overseeing two applications (28 Raymonds Lane, before the Zoning Board of Appeals, and 31 Rosko Drive, before the Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation), scheduled for September hearings.
Neither application can be granted. The reason: the legal insufficiency, according to state law, of both mailing lists announcing those public hearings.
In New York State, every property owner in a subdivision like the 67-lot Rosko Place subdivision has the right to enforce his deed and the common plan and scheme of the subdivision against any other owner, past, present or future. To exercise his constitutional property right, every owner has to be timely informed about any upcoming public hearing for applications for new houses.
During the Epley administration, former Assistant Village Attorney Elbert W. Robinson Jr. made sure that only a few Rosko Place property owners would be alerted to relevant ARB or ZBA public hearings. Instead of using mailing lists alerting all legal property owners, Robinson applied the local law for announcements of public hearings. That way, the Epley bunch was able to silence the expected objections to the huge new houses, which violate neighbors’ privacy, overbuild small lots and violate the deeds, all to satisfy the greed of spec builders whom then-Mayor Mark Epley favored over the residents of this village.
In 2017, Wayne Bruyn, the new village attorney, to provide cover for Robinson, told trustees a local law could trump a state law. Of course not. Yet, Trustee Allan still supports this illegal announcing of public hearings for Rosko applications. She fought the firing of Bruyn even though he had misinformed the trustees about the law.
The result of Robinson’s shenanigans? None of the owners of post-2005 houses in the Rosko Place subdivision have legal grants for their applications. Each one can be challenged in court, because none of those grants was awarded based on a legally noticed ARB or ZBA public hearing. Some mailing lists even illegally include property owners in adjacent neighborhoods, like Hill Street in the case of the current 31 Rosko Drive application.
To add to the injuries, owners of the small ranches and colonials in this originally local Rosko neighborhood are now being socked with significantly increased property taxes, based on the McMansions that they did not want nor had a chance to vote against. That’s taxation without representation.
That’s how Trustee Kimberly Allan sold out the interests of our village residents for give-aways to greedy developers, just like Mark Epley did during his 12 years as mayor. And now, Trustee Allan wants you to vote for her to continue as trustee, along with Mayor Epley’s son, Zach.
I’m voting for Gina and Joe in September!
Evelyn Konrad
Attorney-at-law
Southampton
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