BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Editor/Investigative Reporter
This is the third in a series of stories that will be written about the ongoing situation with CHPE (Champlain Hudson Power Express) and the disruption to businesses and residents their work has created. You will hear the frustration in their voices and words over this. This situation is an ongoing one that small businesses are going to be suffering from for a long time.
Thalia Bosquet, owner of Titan Fitness at 139 US-9W, Haverstraw, NY 10927 raised another legitimate question. “It hasn’t even hit winter yet, and it’s going to start to snow. The plows, the plates are everywhere. Then what happens? The town is going to complain that the machines and the plows are all damaged. They’re going to get money back before we would because it would have made sense now that towns are killing it.
What are you going to do then? It’s about to start snowing and what happens? I could run from Nyack to Haverstraw faster than I get there by car. I was running, but that’s still like that’s crazy. 8 miles I can run it faster.”
“But it, it’s affecting everything like the marinas, right, so like all the marinas and boaters coming through, nobody’s taking their boat up here. Nobody wants to drive through that just, it’s just a trickle down for all, right? So, you can’t just get through one problem that it’s, it’s everything. It’s like a whole problem. Said Tom, owner of Deli Central in Stony Point. He added, “This has gone on so long it’s not just right, so like nobody’s coming.
Nobody wants to go to the to go see the parks. Harriman beautiful, but that used to be a huge part of our traffic.
Now it’s going to go up 9W or you have to go around.
“I have a basic question to ask but for you, Jimmy Monaghan and I both share the same time at the NYPD. Has there been a meeting between CHPE and the town and the businesses?” County Executive Ed Day asked.
A group of people said, “They won’t show up. I think every time they ask them.
Rocky Alexander, Owner of Rock’s Kitchen responded, “My last, my last meeting that I had, that they had, town meeting a week ago, two weeks ago, I said, Jim, let’s sit us, the board. I’m on the board, board, board, let us sit on the board with you and CHPE. CHPE didn’t show up.
Tom stated, “They’re just… since people are bashing them, they don’t, they want nothing to do with it. They want to just turn a blind eye like that that woman that does all the stuff. I don’t know who she is, but she said she came in, she goes, we will no longer do any breakfast, any food because of the post on Facebook. That’s what she told my brother. She goes, it was never, we’re not going to do it anymore. It used to be, you know, $500 to $600 a month extra.
Day responded, “There is the appropriate time for that kind of that. Where and when we don’t know yet, but they’re not being decent about this.”
Ortt had to leave for another engagement in Middletown, but Weber promised to fill him in on the rest so they can formulate a plan to move forward.
Before he left he had one final statement to the business owners.
Bosquet had a statement. “You have a real quick, and I don’t want to offend, but then I want to hold Bill accountable Mr. Weber, because we’ve met before, like we’ve had this, and if this is the first time that you’re hearing about this, you’re forgetting to speak to him because we talked about this, right? So, whatever happens in your meeting, I do need you to refer it back up so they hear that because if not, it defeats the purpose. It’s not just local us.”
Ortt replied, “I know about the meeting. This is the first I’ve heard from you any specific issues about financial loss and, and kind of how long I know this has been an issue. He’s mentioned it to me obviously some of you aren’t in his district, and I have not had a conversation with Senator Harckham.
I have to say, my landlord holds me accountable every month for that rent with the money we removed by all of this. Bosquet said.
. “I was late and then I’m leaving before the meeting is over, but I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to be here to share these issues with me specifically.” He again apologized for having to leave and tried to make an exit.
A person from the media put that to a brief stop. “I’ve got a quick question before you leave. “You mentioned piled on or shame the people to do the right thing. You said, to look for ways to pile on or shame people to do the right thing. What are some examples of that? Have you done that before?
“It’s not like it’s a party, so when I say pile on it means you’re trying to bring as much pressure politically so you’re having a meeting with supervisors, meeting with senators, assembly members, council people, congress people, and that collective you hope will create enough pressure on whether it’s the folks at CHPE, Blackrock or others to get involved because there are clearly some people, the governor and others who I think need to be involved in this conversation, the gentleman back here talked about being outclassed and I, I can appreciate why he says that because look at I see it, especially when you’re talking about local officials, you know, you got a local supervisor, right?”
“He or she could be well meaning could be Republican could be Democrat doesn’t matter, but they’re well-meaning their families so that they maybe they own a business. They grew up there and they go up against some Fortune One company with an army of attorneys and accountants and who’s going to win that you, you know who’s going to win that every day of the week, right? And that’s the reality is that the person who’s looking out for you is sometimes just simply outgunned before the shooting even starts with some of these guys, right? The only way you can combat that is by having a collective group of officials from different levels to try and maybe put pressure on them, shame them or create enough of an outcry to try to get them to do the right thing, and that’s what I meant by that it’s just, you know, piled on meaning I don’t want it to just be these folks at the town board meeting every month and you walk out of it and you go, well, it’s going to happen. You need to elevate it.”
“You need to get more people at the event talking about this and I’ve seen that happen a lot of times when eventually enough people are talking about it, something may get done because it creates enough pressure on people whether they run for re-election or whether they just get shamed to do the right thing, right? That’s what we’re going to try to do. I’m going to look at this MOU to try to zero in to sort of highlight to people who say, well, I can’t be done. You can say yes you can, and here’s where it says so, so we’ll come up whether it’s more money and certainly New York State is very good at finding more of your money, for a lot of other things, so maybe we can find more of your money to go back to you a crazy idea, but that’s all I meant by that.” He concluded and left.
Weber asked if there is anyone else in the back that wanted to speak. yes sir.
“I’m Vinny from Vinny’s Automotive right down the street. They already came on my property and they put in a new gas line and what they call a finished product, I am not happy with. I approached the people on the work crew about you can’t just fill in the hole you dug, but what about the damage your machines did to the other side of the driveway? Oh, we’ll get the black top guy back. I’ll take a look at it. Nobody’s been back to see it and they’re comparing their black top to my black top, my black tops 20 years old. That’s got nothing to do with it. It was perfectly fine before you dug, and now I got cracks and breaks all around both sides of where they did the trench.”
They say as picture is worth a thousand words. James from Congers, made his point with about 8,000 in pictures. “I think if I may add to that, they ripped my drainage system out and they’re refusing to take responsibility for it. This was after a drizzle the next day. That’s my front lawn.” He held up this picture.”
“You can pass by. I’ve stopped them from coming across three of my other properties. When you leave here, if you go down. My main building, they haven’t dug it up yet. You can see what my rest looks like. My building on the right, they dug it up. This is what it looks like now.
They also brushed his pipe and he says it’s not from excavation. It was like that on your ground, so and then we’re going south. They leave They all said that there’s no way they can crush anything underground, that’s a 40,000 pound machine on the lawn.
“So, yeah, and that’s what I feel aside from being blocked, aside from the whole town blocking, the day before. My grass never looked like this. It’s full of sand and everything else. They’re like no, it’s not us, and that’s been a two-week battle going on, and the only reason I’ve got anywhere with them this is because I told them you can’t build my other properties these lines, and they’re at the end of their construction. So now all of a sudden it’s a big problem and they’re starting to respond to me, but I shouldn’t have to stop them from coming on my property because they damaged something and they refused to fix it to get a response.”
Structural problems are not the only issues the people on the corridor are dealing with. This video will explain some of that.
Another person in the gathering asked about getting Kathy Hochul involved in the problem. “Even if you’ve got Kathy here, would she have the ability to pressure CHPE and if you think so, why do you think that? That’s really my question.
Weber stated, “Well, I think it’s in her best interest to do it to help to small businesses which she thinks she’s a big proponent of. I think having her pulpit along with the County Executive’s tool in the toolbox of holding up the PILOT. I think there’s many avenues and we’re trying to leave no stone unturned when it comes to this because and we’re not trying to get false hope. The fact is that we’re dealing with a multi-billion dollar company that obviously as you said, don’t doesn’t care. They don’t care and they’re really not serious about the amount of money that they want to come up with. I think they came up with an extra $50,000 when we continued our pressure effort at the state level.”
That’s why he brought the leader here on his way through the Hudson Valley today to at least get him involved and have him have conversations with his counterparts and also a collective effort to the governor’s office because we’re going to try and leave no stone unturned. Weber isn’t sure where it’s going to lead to but he thinks the continual effort has to be at least done and we really need to go through and not just do nothing about it.
The same person asked, “What does it say to you that we’ve had no response from Hochul’s office for months?”
Well, I just, I think it’s the same lack of Lack of response from them that you’ve seen in the past on other issues as well so that doesn’t mean you stop trying to continue that effort. It was interesting and I think that maybe we have the county executive with this PILOT program not being signed too that’s something that’s a new development in the last, I think a few weeks or the last month. Maybe that’ll bring them to the table as well with a collective effort. Weber answered.
Day continued, “Just get back to see what you said earlier. You know, we absolutely are not giving false hope to anybody. The question was raised about how much money would there be? I don’t know. That’s not false hope. It’s the truth. I don’t know. I don’t know what the cost is. I don’t know what we can extract from them for the mess they made, right? We do what we can do with the information that we have. The information we did have is they have; they place a value on a PILOT it’s just a fact of life. Withdrawing any support for a pilot, what will that do to CHPE? I don’t know. Will it make them buy them more breakfast somewhere? I have no idea. We have to come up with some specific things to do here in order to try to get this moving
The lady said she understands that his ploy with the PILOT is to try to say to them that you will withhold the $14 million over 30-year PILOT and then think that perhaps that will incentivize them to come to the table and negotiate. However, where they may hold the cards is where the businesses may never see the benefit from this is they may say they may call your bluff and they may say okay fine, so let’s go back and appraise everything and maybe they’ll have to pay $30 million instead of $14 million over 30 years which for them is chump change and let me just finish the thought and the other, the other issue is that. As everybody is saying, they’re a big muscular company and if they’re going to turn this into litigation, that’s going to hurt Rockland County. So, it seems like it’s an interesting possibility of a way to get them to the table, but it’s certainly not going to be a guarantee that that you’ll incentivize them that way, and even if you did withhold your PILOT where the rest of the towns and school districts are still that they’re still bound. The difference in money is not going to compensate businesses.”
Tom looked at her sand said, “You said like if he doesn’t sign it, it’s going to destroy Rockland. What are they doing now? I mean, are they destroying Rockland or…
Day jumped in, “It’s not going to destroy Rockland.”
She replied, I said, I said that they could that you know, just bring this to litigation. Her exact words a few minutes earlier were: As everybody is saying, they’re a big muscular company and if they’re going to turn this into litigation, that’s going to hurt Rockland County.
“It’s a card game. It’s just a card game and the last time I looked, when you get 5 cards, you don’t know what what’s underneath until you turn it over. That’s what it comes down to. So, we’re doing something to try to make this happen, and I think that that aspect of this project for CHPE has value. It could be millions of dollars paying all that money up front instead of doing payment in lieu of taxation is could be a significant thing for them.” Day explained
He added, “I don’t know, but that’s the thing we’re working on something here. There’s a way of having a fund that we could bring funding in maybe if that happens, maybe we get that money into that fund and have it dispersed but it’s something and it’s better than nothing. People here want something done and we’re trying to do something that has an effect.
Two questions were raised, Should anyone sue the state? A group of people or a person. Should someone sue the state? Would anyone have standing to sue? I mean, I guess some people would have to standing, but, I mean the business owners.
Day agreed that it was something that can be looked into.
Another business owner queried, “Isn’t the state responsible for construction standards and oversight on a state highway which has been completely absent?”
The response was it would be.
So that’s why wouldn’t you have standing to sue the state when there hasn’t been oversight on a project which is already two years behind
Weber answered that it’s a possibility and a good question.
Bosquet stepped back in. “What happens if you don’t put your cards out there? I know a little bit about poker.
You’re going against this big company. How much are you going to get to go against them with the cards? Are you putting it all in for us? You have to have the money.
“That would depend on the circumstances at that time. If it’s something that we have to continue to fight with, that’s what we will.” Day said trying to reassure the business owners he is with them.
Bosquet continued, “I think that’s what this lady, the reporter is asking is like how much are you willing to go because we know that they’re such a big corporation we are little and going against them as…
Day explained, “Big corporations files law suits all the time. We will do what we have to do as appropriate. We find out as we process through this that there is a, a, a there is an average chance or a good chance to get something out of this, we’ll take that there is, is we don’t know. I’m committed to doing something to make it right for you. We are on a good path and we’re getting some results out of the parts being turned as they go, then we’ll continue on that.”
There was a letter that Weber signed off on and it was bipartisan with Assemblyman Carroll, Assemblyman Eachus and Senator Harckham, I believe as well.
Weber said, “So it is, something that we are trying to work together, they weren’t just ignoring me, she was ignoring people of her own party too. So, what the point is that we got to continue that lobby effort. That’s why I thought it was the least valuable to bring the minority leader in also speak to his counterpart
Weber had a meeting in Haverstraw, and it was a bipartisan meeting with the supervisor of Haverstraw who is a Democrat and Pat Carroll is a Democrat. He’s a Republican. In this bipartisan meeting they listened to some of the businesses that were there, and he doesn’t think the takeaway from that meeting was political at all. He feels that on his end there’s been no exploitation of this for political purposes.
Right now, Day thinks the focus should be trying to have something to fix this and get it better. He doesn’t give a damn if it’s a Democrat or Republican. They’re here to try to do the right thing. Somebody wants to take away negativity to that, that’s their problem. They’re just try to do the right thing.
Alexander said he doesn’t see what Day was talking about happening.
Day said to the people that if they have a problem with a government official, then they should take it to that person directly. “If you felt I did something, tell me what it is and we will talk probably or now probably, but I’m here because I want to be here because what’s going on at home and I’m, I’m getting the same load of, you know what, when I go out and talk to people with CHPE and I get this routine we started 9W paving and they’re not even helping. I do the same thing and the, the wicked annoying from these folks about what, what’s his paper look like? How bad is it?”
Congressman Lawler held a press conference at the Stony Point Bridge and the message he was sending was to Governor Hochul was to declare the area a disaster area so then federal agencies could get involved in order to get loans and grants to the businesses and then when they get money from CHPE it would give them the money to repay the loans. He wrote a letter to Hochul dated September 18, 2025.
Stony Point Construction Crisis: In a letter dated September 18, 2025, Lawler requested Hochul’s intervention to address the economic crisis in Stony Point caused by overlapping construction projects by Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) and Orange and Rockland (O&R) on Route 9W. He asked for the projects to be rescheduled, direct financial assistance for businesses, and better future oversight.
Route 9W is the main commercial corridor for Stony Point’s small businesses and a key artery for commerce in North Rockland. Many of these small businesses are being impacted 24 hours a day, at least 6 days a week, since CHPE works at night and O&R works during the day. With a massive loss of foot traffic due to the ongoing construction, these businesses have suffered significantly, with some reporting up to 75% revenue losses. These losses could shutter many of these locally owned small businesses and damage the local economy in North Rockland – an unacceptable outcome.
While both projects are important they cannot be worked on simultaneously at the expense of our local small businesses. I urge you to end the overlapping work and reschedule either O&R or CHPE’s projects to avoid simultaneous construction. Additionally, it is critical the state provide financial assistance to these businesses suffering from your failure to coordinate these projects properly, and ensure stronger oversight and accountability moving forward so infrastructure projects don’t negatively impact the communities they are intended to benefit.
The State has ultimately permitted these projects and it is up to the State to make sure that these communities are protected from the adverse consequences of your mismanagement.
Day added, “We’ve got people who are avoiding Ridge Road. It’s going to over to 304 because you can’t even get onto Ridge Road. So, I mean, like I said, if it’s, if you see something like that, pull it out.
“I just want to say this is my, this is me taking it to the next level by having the minority leader here. I’m going to speak to Senator Harckham. I would hope he would accelerate to the majority leader of his party as well. This is my version of taking you to the next level, which I think is, is very important. So at least we can continue to move up the food chain to the levels of government.” Weber told them.
“My name is Noel, and I am with Global Collision, the business that hosted the roundtable. I’m just going to share a couple of my personal run-ins with this whole situation. One night they tried to do some construction in front of my business, and they blew up the gas line, and I had emergency crews here from like 7 or 8 o’clock at night all the way until the next morning at 6 a.m. to 7 a.m.. I had a guy in there working on painting and he was trapped. He had to abandon his car here and walk to like I think to 304 and take a taxi from there.”
According to Noel, the crewperson said to the painter if he started his car he was going to run the risk of blowing up the place because any kind of spark, gas will be here. Emergency crews were there overnight, all through the night, and then for like almost like 2 months, 3 months, he would detail the cars and would have to pay to detail them again maybe 2 or 3 times because all the dust and all the debris would go right from the street right on to all the cars outside here.””
“On that particular night I had to like fix cars because when it blew up when they’re working on it they wouldn’t properly mitigate the damage I had like residue all over like probably close to 100 parts and I tried to talk to the people that were involved and nobody knew anything and they gave me to run around. I just, I didn’t realize how vast this was. To me this became my norm, so I never really took it that 100 other businesses are being affected the way like I’m being affected.”
“I know there’s nothing you can do about it and I’m now I’m thinking about this and sometimes I work from home because I’m not going to sit and fight with the school bus traffic and then I’m going to get here I’m going to fight with the construction traffic, and I’ve lost a lot of people. I’ve had conversations with customers. They’re coming in. They’re stuck and they say they’ll come back another day, and they would drive off and then, what I was going to say was the. The damages that I incurred, this seems like almost like hearing everybody’s stories almost like an Erin Brockovich kind of a moment where like she just something on her own and then she got like literally millions so I didn’t realize like I was thinking about that movie and if that’s the thing that needs to happen and I think oh up here I can tell you all these politics with new people involved in, and I always keep the small business in mind to, you know, try to have a conversation that have the relationships and even today’s part of that as well have an inroads because they’re doing their job and I think we have to do our job and if we have to sue somebody I guess then that’s what we have to do.”
One person added to the idea of a lawsuit and having the standing to do so. He mentioned the legal doctrine of strict liability. With things exploding by his business causing damage to his business, and geysers blowing up in Stony Point, that’s strict liability. That is a legal concept that holds a party responsible for damages or harm caused by their actions or a product, regardless of fault, intent, or negligence. This principle is applied in situations with inherent dangers, such as defective products or abnormally dangerous activities, and requires a plaintiff to prove only that the harm occurred and that the defendant’s product or action was the cause.
According to a federal government official present, federal aid is not given when a disaster is localized within a state, town or county, it would have to be something statewide. “It would have to be an impact that affects multiple states and locations, things like that because it is so localized to not just one county but really county in a county and geographical locations within counties unfortunately.
He was asked, “So, lobbying the governor to seek federal economic disaster declaration would be pointless.”
“The governor may have some, pull.” He replied.
One reporter asked, “Can’t the state government declare a disaster at state give small business associations a loan?” The federal government employee said he wouldn’t know anything about that. So the reporter directed the question to Senator Weber.
“We’re gonna research that,” The reporter continued, “They should have. They they give small business grants, they should declare a disaster in the state.”
We’ll look into that, but I think it’s more, it’s more complicated than that and a lot of these small businesses here aren’t looking for small business loans. They’re looking for compensation that they don’t have to.
I understand, but to declare a disaster at least even with a small business loan, you can keep them going until they can start getting compensation and pay back the loan. There’s got to be something the state can do other than sit on their hands.
Weber nodded his head and thanked everyone for coming.