BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Editor/Investigative Reporter
Eugene Bondar, a resident of New City for the past 5 years is running to unseat George Hoehmannn who has been the Clarkstown Town Supervisor for the past 10 years.
He and his wife have been together for 16 years from dating to marriage. He has two children, a son Jackson who is 7 and a daughter Olivia who is 4. He started his career in law school in Massachusetts after which he was a law clerk for Massachusetts Superior Court. He worked on all sorts of cases, civil, complex litigation cases, criminal cases, writing decisions for judges, sitting on in trials, including murder trials.
“I moved back to New York City and I started my, law career working for New York City Department of Transportation as an assistant general counsel. In that role I was responsible for working on contracts for roadways, bridges including the Brooklyn Bridge, Staten Island Ferry and the reconstruction of roads. I was instrumental in completely revamping their insurance compliance program for permit process, for citywide for Department of Transportation.”
His experience continued to be varied, he was the first contracts attorney at the Department of Consumer Affairs. He and his wife moved to Clarkstown on January 1, 2021. He realized that it’s going to be a hell of a commute into Manhattan every day and it was the height of COVID, so they decided that one of them would have to work closer to home. His wife works as a speech language pathologist for New York City Department of Education in the Bronx. It wasn’t easy for her to switch locations out of New York City. He saw a posting online for a job with the County Rockland County Attorney’s office who just happened to be looking for an attorney with experience and transportation and contracts.
Taxes is one of the things that set Bondar to run for office. “First, on a personal level, I saw that my property taxes have been going up since 2021 annually, and they’ve gone up significantly. That was a little bit concerning. Being a government employee at the time I didn’t have a private practice that was my only source of income and my wife being a government employee, our salaries are set and you also have a collective bargaining agreement so you could look into the future of how much you’ll be making and the increases are typically about 3% on year over year and so having limited resources, it became very worrisome to us how are we going to maintain our house if the property taxes go up.”
He started questioning where this money is going? If the taxes are going up but he’s not seeing much change around on a personal level. On a professional level he started noticing more recently the institution and implementation of the new business district in New City and the change in the zoning process so that they were allowed to develop high density housing.
“I kind of have this phobia because coming from New York City and knowing that brings congestion, and filth, it’s a totally different quality of life. I realized that that’s what’s going to come here because of my experience in zoning and land use as well as, planning and, transportation.” He said.
Infrastructure is needed to sustain the high-density housing and if you look historically, Clarkstown and Rockland at large are farmland. According to Bondar when they built and developed it into the suburban sprawl with single family homes, low density the infrastructure we have was never meant to maintain high density housing, and the roads, they are a single lane in each direction, some double lanes, but certainly not able to withstand everything. Having been an attorney for the planning board for the county, he was privy to see applications countywide from all municipalities. There are some municipalities here who are already on track to develop high density housing.
He further explained, “I was able to hear the traffic effects, resource depletion and secret reports exactly. I know what’s to come. That’s what has driven me to run. Third, just hearing what my friends and neighbors went through when they would report things to the town and sometimes the town is not responsive or sometimes, they’re responsive. If you read a news article, you’ll see illegal housing closed down, migrants removed from housing, good stuff, we want that. As an attorney I go on the court’s website and public access look at those, court decisions, they’re settlements and basically, it’s a light slap on the wrist. There are no real fines. This is a problem because the town attorney per the town supervisor being the client and the town authority actually engages with the defendants and settles these and then they file the settlements with the court.
“The court doesn’t really have much discussion when it’s a mutual settlement, you know, so that’s really where the frustration is and being in this area and understanding what you know, the there’s lack of real consequences, you’re essentially just fostering a pay to play scheme by the property owners because it’s a light slap on the wrist. Those are the kind of the major things that led me to run for this position.”
Bondar brought up some statements about the infrastructure in Clarkstown. What does he see as the problems with the infrastructure in Clarkstown, roads, buildings, and the developments? “To clarify, when I say infrastructure, I’m talking about municipal infrastructure. The buildings, the developments, that’s private, but, that has negative impact. The town still has to approve. The planning board has to approve things and that all plays around with the infrastructure, the road uses, the plumbing, and everything else, drainage, regardless of who’s building it and who’s responsible for it.
“When the engineers were building and designing that road, I highly doubt that they foresaw, you know, such volume. The side effect of it is that the road is going to be used significantly more than it’s intended to be used. On the roadways, they could use good work. In terms of the interplay between new developments that are high density and the infrastructures, the size of the pipes, the diameters of the sewer pipes and the drainage system that we have, it wasn’t designed for that capacity. You can buy bigger pipes; you can install bigger systems if you know that that’s the volume you’re going to have.” He stated.
He pointed out that when they initially install it, they kind of plan for some expansion of the community, but certainly not to this level and what we’re going to see a lot of the flooding. There’s another factor that implies that when you’re taking up soil and you’re putting a concrete box on it that water that used to be absorbed is now getting displaced into the near vicinity, and that’s going to cause pooling of water and flooding.
Not to mention the situation with the water pressure. You see this in other localities here when you’re putting 40 units, that’s possibly 40 more people using some sort of water, right, either faucets or showers at the same time.
He added, “At that time and especially during commercials and at halftime. When that happens, you’re pulling more water away from that whole system and water pressure is going down. What we saw happened in Spring Valley in a couple of instances with fires is when they came there wasn’t sufficient water pressure in the fire hydrants That was the Jared Floyd, Evergreen situation was devastating and possibly could have been, avoided. The only way to mitigate all of these issues is not to say, well, we can’t build here because our infrastructure doesn’t sustain this. I think you have to have smart and sustainable developments.”
Bondar feels you need to look at everything in a comprehensive manner and have a comprehensive plan for long term so you know exactly how many units in total you can sustain. Then you have to strategically place them. Zone them in areas, not all in clusters like you’re seeing now happening in New City. Over 500 units are going in the main street. Then you have to also make sure that your infrastructure is upgraded.
“What we’re not doing here is, we’re not passing the cost that’s associated with upgrading infrastructure. Frankly I don’t think we’re upgrading it. We’re just putting it on the existing infrastructure, but what we should be doing is upgrading this infrastructure when these opportunities come up with new developments. We need to pass the cost on to the developers and not the taxpayers. There’s plenty of municipalities that do this. This is written in their zoning code. They’re saying that if you’re going to seek a variance for X, you’re going to have to do A, B, and C. You’re going to have to do those things plus you’re going to have to create green space, open space, community space. You want to build by enhancing the surrounding area, not just by taking in a vacuum, a plot of land and building a high density building on it and saying you’re all done, that’s just causing future problems.”
“We should be doing that, and we should be implementing a lot of green infrastructure to mitigate some of the flooding issues. There are fires swells that you can put in to make sure that this water gets absorbed. I don’t think it has to be at a significant cost to the taxpayers because the taxpayers that have been living here long term are already paying into their system so they’re not benefiting from this new high density. If anything, they’re only negative impacts on them.”
“I plan on fixing the issues here is by modernizing the zoning code. We’re going to include provisions in that code that ensure sustainable development. We’re going to then make sure that we’re approving these applications pursuant to the comprehensive plan. The town has a comprehensive plan, but we’ve deviated from that plan substantially. It’s no longer reflecting the reality of the situation in New City with those units there’s no way that 3 or 4 Main Street and all the budding roads can sustain 500 units, at least 500 cars, probably more.
Rockland is not very walkable. You need a car to get to any other part of the town. The solution for this would be to ensure the developers provide alternative methods of transportation. We don’t have a very comprehensive transportation system in Clarkstown. You have in the county, but within Clarkstown you have a couple of buses.
You have the mini trans service and then you have the TOR buses. We need to make sure that the new developments, the high-density ones are providing either shuttle buses to the public transportation hub to the train or main bus stations.”
Another idea he had for alleviating the traffic situation with the new developments is to make sure that they may be providing rental car services. He says there are developments where they have a couple of rental cars just parked available strictly for the residents’ use, so not everyone needs a car every day. Maybe someone commutes somewhere, so they’ll take the shuttle to the commute and on the weekend when they need to run some errands, they can just rent the car, but it’s going to remove and mitigate having 500+ cars on those properties.
He mentioned how taxes are going up. George Hoehmann said that in his 10 years Clarkstown has had approximately a 1% increase per year when you aggregate it out in terms of taxes and some years maybe a little more, some years a little less, but averaging about 1%. You’re saying you’re going up 3, 4%.
“I don’t know the specific percentage. I just know as a resident that my taxes have been increasing, and when you look at some of the town resolutions, as recently as, within the last year, you’ll see that, in New York State, local municipal governments are statutorily allowed to raise up to 2%. They don’t have to. Anything above you need special action. The town did that and they did that to make a 2.3% increase. I think this year they’re slated to make a 4% increase on property taxes. It’s a big issue which is that at the same time the frustrating thing is, if you look at the town’s resolutions that, happen at the board meetings, we see a lot of tax certiorari settlements.”
“I think there’s a case to be made for all of that supported by these certiorari settlements, especially the ones that are being settled, to the detriment of our tax money. Now if you look at the county, the county collects taxes to property taxes. The county doesn’t engage in this practice. They do not settle. If the taxes are past due, they don’t even settle for that. They ultimately end up auctioning off the property to recoup their money. I think that has to certainly be looked at because to me that’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. We’re supposed to preserve the money and conserve it and not give it back to the property owners.”
Could it be that they settle because sometimes fighting it could end up costing them more in the end
“As an economical decision? Anything is possible. But again, we’re talking about a large volume of these types of certioraris. Why are we in that position? Look at the Palisades Mall. You see what to me is a concerning scenario. The Palisades Mall has been paying a certain tax rate. Ultimately the courts found that they were overpaying it. When it came time to refund the money to the Palisades Mall, Clarkstown School District had the money put aside, they had it in reserve in a special account. They wrote a check and they were finished.
Clarkstown had to bond the money, borrow money to pay that off. The total was $7.8 million.”
His question in this, why is that the case that if school district somehow foresaw that there was at least a great likelihood of this happening, they put this money aside, but the town had no money available to pay for that, so they had to borrow money with interest for 30 years to pay back and refund the taxes that they were recessing. “That’s very concerning because when you’re in government. By law municipalities in New York State have to have a balanced budget. They can run and to the red and we don’t have a surplus, that we know of.
Our budget is dollar to dollar. You’re seeing actions taken by the town administration where they are borrowing money to do things like refund taxes, to pay for $15,000 leaky pipe in a community pool on an emergency basis.
We’re municipal government with a $100 million plus annual budget. We should not be borrowing $15,000 to pay back for a repair. That indicates to me that we don’t have any money available and that’s further support why we would have to borrow to pay back these refunds with interest and that also goes to a possible scenario where that is a pattern of over assessing is to make ends meet so that you can constantly meet your budget. I think that if you look at the budget you will see that there’s a lot of spending happening that could be slashed, it could be made much more efficient and with those efficiencies you’ll have tremendous savings and also when you’re bonding. Even with our bond rate you could still save by not having to borrow.”
“You have to be a little bit more careful in making decisions on what you’re bonding. Just for context, government bonding is intended for long term capital improvements so if you want to fix infrastructure like a building or a park or something sure you can borrow for that. It’s not intended to be used for paying back refunds of debt, it’s not intended to use for making minor diminishing repairs because remember borrowing is essentially going through a process where you have to include underwriters and attorneys. There are fees, just like buying a house there’s closing costs. You have to weigh the cost of bonding to the amount of money you’re getting from that. When it comes to bonding money for our recreational activities to me having two little children it’s concerning.”
He says he can’t help it, but every time he goes to a park or field that has been paid with bonded money, in the back of his mind, he knows that his child is playing there now and they’re going to grow up and as a resident of Clarkstown they will be still paying back for this money that was used when they were kids that is wrong. He says it’s basically giving someone a credit card and saying you can’t pay this back for now. Don’t worry about it. Go use it when you grow up, you’ll pay it back.
In a way he’s saying the taxes are not being used in the best way possible or efficiently.
“There’s waste of the taxpayers’ money happening here on large scale that could all be rather quickly addressed and let’s not forget who is responsible. The town’s chief fiscal officer pursuant to the charter is the supervisor. He is the ultimate architect of the budget and then gets approved by the town board. The town board should be putting a check and balance on that budget, and if you look historically, during Hoehmann administration almost always the town board votes in unison with the supervisor. I do not see any checks and balances.
“We are paying every year it’s becoming due and over the years much more is going to become due. We’re paying this on a rolling basis from our operating funds. That’s wrong. That should be money set aside for that and that’s what other municipalities, that’s what unions are doing, that’s what people do for themselves for retirement, that’s essentially the same. You have an IRA account, but you don’t wait till you’re retired and then start saving. You end up having to get another job to keep paying for your living and that’s what we’re doing for these employees. We’re talking about police officers, teachers, public servants, groundskeepers and everyone who has worked for the town that receives a pension.”
What’s also a little bit concerning to him is what happens if the town can’t meet its obligations. One day something happens and it can’t meet those obligations. Those people won’t get their pensions. They won’t get their benefits, and he wants to make sure that they’re protected. As a public servant himself he wants to ensure that the employees that are working can be assured that when their time comes to retire, their benefits are guaranteed.
Government accountability. On your Palm card, you said that putting people first with accountable leadership and fiscal responsibility driven by meaningful public participation. As town supervisor, how would you make the government more accountable to the constituents?
“Great question. I’m very passionate about this topic because I have 10 years of experience being in government and dealing with the public officer’s law in New York state which includes freedom of information for record releases and public meetings law providing availability of openness of the meetings that are public. I can tell you several things. You cannot have accountability unless you have transparency because without transparency no one knows what questions to ask. They don’t know where to look. In order to achieve transparency, you have to follow those laws which can be interpreted by different governmental bodies differently. It ultimately comes to the culture and the ideologies of the leadership whether they want to be fully transparent or not.”
His idea of transparency for Clarkstown is to do a few things that there’s no cost to do. They should be live streaming all of the public meetings. Anytime there is a public board meeting that happens, not recorded as the town has, it should be readily available online on YouTube. You click a link, and you watch the meeting. After that, all of the draft minutes by law are required to be uploaded, which he doesn’t see.
“We have minutes that come out afterwards. If you weren’t at the meeting and you’re reading the minutes, you can’t really know if something was in the minutes or not. Maybe some nuances, maybe some resident made a statement that you would find important, but maybe somehow, it’s not in there. Secondly, there’s no reason why a lot of the records that are accessible to the public by law, if you go through the Freedom of Information Law request process, you will get things such as contracts, amendments to the contracts that are just a click away. There are a lot of municipalities out there if you go visit their website, those records are readily available.” He said.
Finishing his thoughts on this topic, he stated, “Not only is that transparency, but that actually cuts down on the resources needed on the back end of someone’s request if 10 people request the same document, which happens often. You can just have it on the website and nobody has to ask you for that.”
“When I’m supervisor, I want to have podcast series where the town department heads, commissioners, directors on a rotating weekly basis go on the podcast and talk about their current projects they can talk about the challenges they have. I think those things will be very helpful. Anyone can just tune in and listen and other municipalities have this.”
He further explained, “It shows the residents what’s going on so they can better understand the overall moving of the governmental pieces and at the same time it’s transparent and accountable. I think there are a lot of good fixes for accountability, and we’re completely lacking it. There’s also legal repercussions for not following those laws when the requesters leverage the law because they know how to. There are attorneys’ fees the municipalities have to pay if they withheld those records, it’s very important to follow the law. In my time in the county, I was the counsel to the FOIA appeals officer who was the Deputy County Executive. On an appeal level we had a lot of situations where we would have to decide whether the record should be given or not and I can tell you confidently we always erred on disclosure because it’s public information. If you come to your job as a public servant, whatever the public needs you must accommodate them to the extent permissible by law. I think it’s very easy to accomplish that transparency and to be accountable.
Another thing he said he wants to see is meaningful public participation. One thing that I’ve seen in my time in working newspapers here in Rockland County covering the government primarily major amounts of apathy. I go to town board meetings; there’s hardly anybody there. I’ve covered Clarkstown meetings and it seems to get more people in the Clarkstown meeting than Haverstraw meetings, and that auditorium is big, empty.
I was at a meeting in the Village of Haverstraw and there were more people there when they had the public hearings. After the public hearings were done, everybody was gone. One other and I were the only ones left for the business part of the meeting. How do you turn that apathy into activeness? Why do you think they’re so apathetic?
Bondar responded, “I agree with you. I see this on many levels in government, but not all governments. Some governments, some agencies, there’s a lot of turnout by the citizens, and I recognize the differences and, and here’s the difference. Humans get demoralized when they’re not listened to when they’re not seeing any reactions to their claims. If you go to some of these public board meetings and you express dissatisfaction or you express concerns or dissent and you don’t see the government reacting to it, ultimately, you’re going to get demoralized and you’re going to say I’m not going it’s useless. The agencies that aren’t getting large turnout is because they see time and time again that their feedback isn’t taken into account and this all goes down to the leadership philosophy. That is a distinction that there is between me and the current supervisor.”
His assessment based on the last decade is that the Supervisor of Clarkstown is a ruler, not a leader. He says he will lead, and there’s a fundamental difference between the two. A leader takes that public input and acts on it. They react to it to accommodate what the public wants. They will come into the community and say we’re going to do a new project. We have a capital project fund for this. What would you like? He will ensure that he gets public input on major issues and see if that’s what the community wants.
“What we need to do is we need to not rule and wake up one morning and say I think this is what’s best for the residents. You shouldn’t be in the position to think about what’s best for the residents. The legislature does it at an open meeting, and you can solicit public input. I mean setting aside a specific time and place to just inform the public and say at this stage we’re holding.”
“An example of being a ruler not a leader that deeply concerns me and frankly every single constituent I’ve spoken to, and the people involved in the field concerns them too and that is this past June at a town board meeting. The supervisor has made a determination; a consultant was hired to assess the emergency medical services in Clarkston. Now, just for a little bit of background, there’s basic life support where you have Emergency Medical Technicians, EMTs, who provide basic life support for not life-threatening events and then there’s advanced life support that is comprised of paramedics. They drive different vehicles and, depending on the nature of the call, sometimes only the BLS (Basic Life Support) team is dispatched and sometimes you also have the paramedics who are needed for life-threatening events that are dispatched.”
“I wasn’t there, but I was reviewing the minutes of the meeting. The consultant was a retired police officer to consult on the emergency medical services, not law enforcement medical services. Based on his assessment he recommended that it is better to cut down response time by instead of having two advanced life support personnel paramedics in a vehicle arriving simultaneously at a call, to split them and for them to each be in a single car because this way they can don’t necessarily always have to be together and if they need back up then they’ll eventually arrive but maybe some minutes apart. This was done with this expert’s recommendation and this expert based this on using the model that law enforcement uses for patrol cars.”
He thinks those models cannot be really compared because what law enforcement does in their responses is very different from what paramedics do in their responses but nevertheless that was the recommendation made and it certainly would cut response time sometimes because you may you have one additional vehicle that is maybe closer to the vicinity.
“This recommendation was taken by the supervisor without any consultation or input from the emergency medical services personnel. There was never any feedback sought from them if this is a workable model and based on that report, the supervisor decided that he’s going to now acquire another vehicle and he’s going to separate these paramedics. When I was reading that, I was very distraught just as a human, I will expect if you call 911, they will come rapidly if you need them to.
In emergency situations sometimes response time matters, but what he found during studies, these are national studies that they’ve done is that time only matters 5% of the time. 95% of the time a positive outcome is actually not based on the response time, but it’s based on the comprehensive level of care you’re getting. So in other words, if an individual needs to be intubated and an IV needs to go in as soon as possible and you can’t have these basic life support technicians perform those they’re not trained they’re not certified so you want to have that available now.
“I stepped back a little bit and went back into my natural state of mind which is being an attorney and I started thinking from a government perspective there’s also liability issues here. If you’re making such a drastic decision on behalf of a town and God forbid someone dies because they got one paramedic instead of two, what are you really basing this on, a report by a law enforcement officer’s recommendation, not even a paramedic’s recommendation. You didn’t seek their input through and see if that would work for them.”
Further research he did on how many, ambulances do they have, and how many paramedics do they have showed him that they don’t have that many. “You have to take the call volume into consideration, and we have enhanced call controls in place but not advanced enhanced. There’s more advanced systems out there that as a resident, in the back of my mind I’m saying, I’m paying high taxes, why isn’t more money going into this? I started looking at the business side of things, and I noticed that every time you call an ambulance, they bill your insurance company. It’s not like the town is paying 100% of the cost. There’s money coming in and then I looked at the ambulance corps budget because that money is given by the town and they’re only getting $4.5 million a year. The Rockland paramedic services are contracted for. It’s not transparent how much they’re getting. What we have here is a lack of deference and recognition of our paramedics and EMTs.”
“We are making rulings by making decisions based on our own instincts and by our, I mean the supervisor’s instincts without real regard to science data, practice, and what’s best for the residents and most importantly with complete disregard for our resident’s health and safety. That goes back to accountability, transparency, budgeting and prioritizing the use of money.”
As supervisor, he says he will ensure the following: He will make sure that every single paramedic and EMT has fair pay. They’re going to recognize the volunteers for their service. He doesn’t really see any recognition. They’re going to make sure they are getting the resources they need, make sure that every paramedic vehicle is going to have the set up that a real consultant is going to assess and recommend and talk to the EMTs and the paramedics and decide if that’s a workable model for them because when you’re giving someone tools who’s doing the job they’re the best to know what tools they need to do the job.
He spoke about wanting to keep taxes down, wouldn’t splitting that up, create the need to buy another car, insurance, gas maintenance and equipment in another car. He thought about that too, and it is another expense. It’s an overall expense and without having a study done by a qualified consultant, he said he can’t definitely speak to it, but it seems to him in looking into this, that they don’t even have sufficient, number of paramedics because what also ends up happening is you see sometimes, neighboring municipalities they don’t have enough resources, they’ll pull from Clarkstown a paramedic that goes there. The more resources we’re pulling away from other places, so we, maybe the 4th car is a good idea, but they’re going to fill that car probably with 2 more paramedics just to expand the services.
“There are two things at least that are extremely advanced with the drone system, one, it’s called drone as a first responder and it’s a fascinating tool. It’s autonomous, so they have installed stations throughout the town on rooftops and other areas where every time someone calls 911, a drone is autonomously on its own.
Dispatched to that area and they arrive before first responders to give the first responders a visual of the scene and it has all the technologies that our drones currently have here including heat sensors and night vision and so forth, but it does this on its own. It’s a very good complex system.”
“I want them to understand that as a supervisor I would be there to support them right because we’re all in the same mission which is to serve the residents and that is all I’m about is to make sure that the residents are getting the best value out of the investments they put into this community moving on from the law enforcement, public safety, our fire team, right, they possibly may need more things too. You know, these fire engines cost a lot of money. We want to make sure that our firefighters have the right equipment they need, that they have the right working conditions. Don’t forget they’re volunteer firefighters too, these guys and women are doing this out of their goodness of heart, so we need to appreciate them.”
“We need to recognize all there should be public campaigns just showing how good, they are. Frankly I think Clarkston Police Department is one of the friendliest departments. I’ve lived in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. They come visit my kid’s daycare once a year to build that community relationship so that kids are familiar with the law enforcement, the firemen and paramedics all come. They’re community helpers as they call them in daycare. It’s really good, but I think we need more engagement like that.”
“We shouldn’t pay for ads we should do it to recognize our public servants, and that goes even beyond the first responders, it goes to recognizing all the civil servants who if they worked in private industry most of the times, they would make much more money. I know this firsthand. When you’re working in government you’re working to your own financial detriment. You’re doing it because you want to contribute to the community, you want to be involved in that community, The least you can do is recognize your employees and make them feel they’re there for a purpose. There’s also a component of public safety that doesn’t necessarily concern crime because statistically speaking compared to some bigger metropolitan areas our crime is not as high. It’s not a bad reflection on the law enforcement because they’re not there all the time. They can’t be everywhere.”
He then spoke of quality-of-life issues that could be fixed that need to be addressed not by law enforcement but by code enforcement officers, buildings department, zoning board. The illegal housing crisis.
“I’m going to just touch upon the safety component of it. If you look at what’s happening and when I worked for the county, I wasn’t directly involved with the Office of Buildings and Codes, enforcement. I was familiar with the type of cases they were dealing with, and you see that in illegal housing, the objective of that property owner, the wrongdoer, is to fill that house with as many people as they can to make as much money as possible. They have no morals if they did, they wouldn’t be breaking the code. I’ve seen photos of kids sleeping on a porch in winter. Literally on a porch with extension cords that are in really poor condition with no smoke detectors. There are no fire extinguishers, nothing.”
Not speaking hypothetically, Bondar says these places are ticking time bombs, there were a lot of fires that happened, and a lot of casualties unfortunately. It’s not just about responding to these complaints, but it’s also taking proactive measures. In order to take proactive measures, you need to form a joint code enforcement task force which has to have multiple agencies involved. You could even expand that if you know the county stakeholders will agree to include the Department of Health, Child Protective Services, and the District Attorney’s office. When they arrive at that scene any aspect of wrongdoing can be addressed then and there.
“I don’t see that happening. Enforcement happens in the election season. Couple of houses here, migrants or illegal daycare. But then the off-election year. It’s crickets, you don’t hear, but I’ve been campaigning and I hear from constituents, they say, I’ve called the town multiple times. They’ll come and say, I didn’t find anything. What do you mean you didn’t find anything? I see this happening. Eight cars parked there and 15 garbage cans on the street. It can’t be a single family!”
He emphasized that you have to have a proactive take on it. They have some of the tools there, like a rental registry but they’re not enforcing that. If they’re enforcing it, part of that permit that you’re issuing, you can make sure that the property owner agrees to regular inspections. You don’t need to go get a warrant based on a complaint.
“If there are settlements with some damages, they pay the fines, they do it quickly. The fines we have are statutory. They’re not easy to change the amounts, so you don’t have much room. You may be talking about $5000 – $10,000 maximum per day, but you don’t know how long the bad activity was happening. We have attorneys working for the town, full-time attorneys on staff that are very capable of seeing through these violations, if need be, through trial. We shouldn’t be settling. We should be using every single legal tool and mechanism to go through all the procedural minutiae intentionally to put financial strain on their legal fees because they’re hiring lawyers and those lawyers believe me are charging a lot of money per hour. The more hours we put them through this process, the more cost it’s going to be to them.”
“We’re going to drain them financially so badly that they’re going to lose any interest in doing this because it’s not going to be profitable for them. If these are serious violations, we’re going to condemn the property to eliminate that possibility from it happening again. I’m very certain that eventually and rather quickly after a couple of examples they’re going to understand that Clarkstown is not one of the areas where you can conduct illegal activity because it’s not profitable. If you take away their ability to make money, you’re taking away the problem, and that’s how we’re going to fix that public safety issue.”
Everybody’s complaining about the economy. From 2021 to 2025 until October 1st of this year, we were under the Biden economy. As of October 1st, we transitioned from the Biden economy to the Trump economy after the BBB was passed. How do you see the economy in Clarkstown?
He explained, “The economy in Clarkstown is growing in terms of marketables. That is a correlation of inflation because there’s higher inflation, prices are higher, we collect more sales tax. From that end it’s growing. From the business standpoint I think it’s withering. It’s not growing, because the mall is half vacant. It looks like it was just evacuated recently. You have a lot of storefronts in Clarkstown that are empty. “You also have, from talking to some business owners you have this, sense of insecurity in the future because demographics are changing, markets are changing, no one wants to invest short term unless it’s some sort of a quick venture like, putting a vape shop on top of a daycare. How do you even allow that? What you end up having is a lack of trust in the business sector and long-term investments in our community. I want to fix that because as a small business owner myself, I think it’s very important to have a thriving local business account.
His opinion is that Clarkston remains the economic engine of Rockland having 60% of the rateables in the county. They have significant industries there including car dealerships, home improvement stores, medical facilities, malls, shopping, food shopping centers, a lot of big stores and small businesses, but I’d like to see more novel uses. They don’t need 5 chicken sandwich shops on Route 59 next to all the other fast-food places for various reasons.
“I want to use Chick fil A as an example. Right around the time I heard that it was approved before it was built. I was very upset. It was a little bit personal because there used to be a sushi restaurant called Momoyama. I would go there often and besides having fresh, good quality sushi there, it was always heartwarming to see. It was an authentic family-owned business. They were very friendly. When you walk into that real family-owned business, you get that feeling. When I found out that restaurant had to go out of business for a concrete corporate box that has no ties to the community, I felt they could have approved the Chick fil A in another location. They’ll say, oh, those businesses were dying, they were vacant. We should have been doing something to help them grow, that was a good restaurant.”
“It needed assistance, you have that, view of the local economy here and the town can do so much to help the local business community. “There are several approaches that I will take one, most importantly, we need to cut the red tape. We’re a small town. We can issue these permits, do the inspections, get approvals significantly faster and streamline the process. Make the applications readily available, fillable forms online.”
“We can use all sorts of software efficiencies to make sure that the business owners get it faster because remember business is money and as soon as they rent that place, the landlord wants his rent. They don’t care whether you got approved or you haven’t.”
“I’m going to cut that time significantly. I’ve done different permitting processes. I’ve revitalized systems and reconstructed how applications are reviewed. I know where we can cut this red tape. The second thing is we need to have an employee, not elected officials interfacing with small businesses as a coordinator they can come to, if they have an issue with the town or they need some help or perhaps even the state. You need to ensure that for businesses, you are also providing them with Customers, so you want to put businesses in locations that are accessible. You need to make sure that you’re doing things in a comprehensive way to have accessibility to all of these businesses.
The mall is falling apart, Pyramid’s gone bankrupt, basically, they’re $413 million in debt. That’s a major ratable for the County and for Clarkstown. They’re losing a lot of money with all the businesses that aren’t there and everything else that’s going on. There’s been a number of plans floated but what can you, what do you see as a way to revitalize them and utilize it to the town’s benefit.
“I’m kind of glad you left this question for last because I’m going to wrap in everything I’ve said previously and it’s good because all of the principles that we discussed today I think are tied into this. This is about leadership, not rulers. We don’t rule, we lead. We have to be cognizant that it’s a privately owned place, so we cannot come in and say we don’t want you to be a mall anymore we want you to be mixed use housing because it’s privately owned as long as their use revolves around their permitted use, which is commercial retail space with some restaurants they can continue on being a mall for the next 100 years. Maybe it will be vacant and maybe it will look, just the way it looks now. If they are seeking variances, for changing the use, that’s when opportunity opens up. That’s where we have more influence but not unlimited influence. We need something for longer term.”
The question comes down to all of this, what we have worked our way to for these past 2 hours. Why you? Hoehmann’s been in for 10 years. He says he’s got a what people have told him is a proven record in the town.
His answer began, “One. The experience I have it’s unmatched. I’ve worked on projects from $100,000 to $16 billion infrastructure projects, mega projects that are recognizable and will be recognizable all over the world. I have dealt with all aspects of government, three branches on city, state and county levels. I have experience dealing with different stakeholders involved. I know how to approach them and make relationships work for everyone’s benefit. I also have business experience that I know how to leverage, and I see things through a different light. I also have principles and morals that I will ensure are not only I employ in my practices, but that all of the town’s employees will follow.
“I’m fiscally conservative. I believe that you have to be very efficient with taxpayers’ money. You can spend your own money on how you deem appropriate. When you’re holding someone else’s money you have to be frugal with it. The longer a public servant works, the higher their pension is, the more money and the benefits. I think from that perspective we don’t need people to be here for a long time.”
He concluded, “If the President of the United States can achieve their agenda, In 8 years. I would be hard pressed to believe that there is any supervisor that needs longer than 8 years to achieve their agenda on a town, county or state level. I think there should be term limits on every level of government. It’s good to take a look at to see if maybe 2 years is too short of a term because it takes away from your focus in Congress. I will do everything that I have in my control as supervisor to initiate the process to put in the term limits now whenever I speak to anyone, I want to make set realistic goals. I don’t make promises that I don’t keep. It makes me feel bad. I’m cognizant that I would need a majority to pass the resolution to even kick start this process. If I’m there and hopefully Mark Licker’s there, there’s only two of us unless we get some of the Republicans to vote for this, we won’t really advance this.
“We have an amazing slate. You’ve interviewed majority of our slate. You know that we are about common-sense approach. We know what we can impact locally. We are all honest and driven to the success of the town. That’s what we want to do. I have been advocating making sure you get everyone elected because then we can actually come in and put our mouth to action and our ideas into play and we’re going to create these policies that will benefit everyone. They’re not political, they’re practical. They’re going to be felt because local government has the biggest impact on your wallet and property taxes, on your quality of life, and on your well-being through environment and you how you live here. That’s why it’s important to make sure that there’s a majority of us in town council.