MAYOR OF MONTEBELLO WANTS RAMAPO PLANNING BOARD FROZEN

Letter from the Mayor of Montebello Lance Millman:

All Planning and Zoning Board members have been appointed and approved by the Town Board, presumably upon St. Lawrence’s recommendations. Land-use board member have been active in all aspects of the town’s approvals, including one prior zoning board member, now a Town Board member, who has been arrested.

All town Planning and Zoning Board activities must halt until all indictments have been handed down and until all information is released. One cannot help but now wonder how these boards have been operating. In addition to a freeze on land-use board actions, the Town Board should immediately act on a moratorium on all building approval and zone changes until all has been made public and resolved.

The current zoning and planning boards have demonstrated little adherence of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan, its Scenic Preservation Law, and other laws passed by the Town Board; planning and zoning decisions by these boards have given short shrift to thorough environmental review required under SEQRA. Such approvals may not represent the land-use boards’ fiduciary responsibility to the Town Board and to the public.

One must now wonder who else might soon join the indictment parade. I call upon all other villages within the Town of Ramapo to join me in demanding that the town immediately put a freeze and moratorium in place on both the Zoning and Planning boards.

The writer is mayor of the Village of Montebello, which is in the Town of Ramapo. This letter was originally published in the Journal News