F.B.I. Raid Renews Focus on Ballpark Deal in Rockland
By PETER APPLEBOME
RAMAPO, N.Y. — When federal agents last week spent seven hours extracting documents and computer files from Town Hall here, attention immediately turned to the financing of a local ballpark. The stadium was the subject of a withering state audit last year suggesting officials inappropriately mingled private and public enterprises for a risky development.
But the raid last Wednesday also set in motion a guessing game centered on which of a welter of local controversies could become part of the investigation in a town where the increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population in communities like Kaser, Monsey and New Square has made it the fastest-growing area in Rockland County, and perhaps the most divided.
“We started making a list of all the things they could be going in for,” said Susan Shapiro, a local lawyer who is among those fighting a huge proposed housing development in what has been a largely rural section of the town. “There are so many choices.”
Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have not released details on the case, but in Ramapo it is often hard to know where one inquiry ends and another begins.
The ballpark has been a divisive issue for some time. In 2010, residents, with more than 70 percent of the votes in opposition, rejected a $16.5 million plan to finance the construction of a minor-league baseball stadium for a team in the independent Can-Am League.
Undeterred, town officials went ahead, guaranteeing $25 million in bonds issued by the Ramapo Local Development Corporation, a private nonprofit corporation set up to build what is now called Provident Bank Park. The corporation’s president and chairman is Christopher St. Lawrence, the town supervisor and the stadium’s primary advocate.
In an audit released in February 2012, the state comptroller’s office said that taxpayers could end up being on the hook for up to $60 million in costs related to the project, and that the town appeared to have “inappropriately mingled its activities” with the development corporation.
“Ramapo officials ignored red flags that the project numbers didn’t add up, which could adversely impact its finances for years to come,” the audit by Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said. He added that officials used the local development corporation to circumvent procurement practices and other legal obligations the town would have faced.
Auditors also faulted a plan to pay off the stadium by using profits from another project, a housing development on Elm Street in the village of Spring Valley financed by loans totaling $30 million. A former county legislator, Bruce Levine, filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office last year saying that the project is illegally enriching investors who bought units and then rented them out instead of the corporation selling them directly to low-income people.
Then there is litigation over a 200-acre parcel called the Patrick Farm, one of the town’s largest developable pieces of property, which has been rezoned to allow dense multifamily development miles from the current high-density population zones. Opponents of the project say it has been pushed along by Mr. St. Lawrence and the developers in violation of the town’s master plan, and despite the fact much of it sits atop streams and wetlands that feed the Mahwah River, a prime source of drinking water.
Opponents of Patrick Farm won a major victory last week. The Army Corps of Engineers, reversing an earlier finding, wrote a letter saying that the developer, who had the town’s support, was in error in claiming there was no need for a determination by the corps of the extent of the wetlands and waters on the property.
(All of these controversies are separate from the troubles in Spring Valley, which is partially in Ramapo. The village’s mayor, Noramie F. Jasmin, and her deputy, Joseph A. Desmaret, were arrested and charged in April in a bribery scheme that also ensnared State Senator Malcolm A. Smith and three others.)
Mr. St. Lawrence, a Democrat, has had little to say about the investigation, and did not return phone calls. He spoke briefly to reporters last week and on a local radio show, saying he was cooperating with the investigation. “They didn’t question or say anything,” he said on the radio show. “That’s really about it. I don’t have much more to say about that. We’ll see what plays out.”
Last year, in the wake of the state audit, he defended the projects, saying everything by the town and development corporation was done lawfully.
“We have never circumvented any procurement practices on either of the projects,” he said.
Ramapo’s population of 126,000 is a diverse, contentious mix: longtime suburbanites; an influx of Hispanic, Haitian and Asian immigrants; and a growing ultra-Orthdox Jewish population, housed in vast apartment complexes, that has transformed the look and politics of the town in recent decades. With their ability to vote as a bloc and in overwhelming numbers, observant Jews have become the dominant voting group whether in the town, where they have supported Mr. St. Lawrence, or in the East Ramapo Central School District, where the students are mostly black and Hispanic and the school board is controlled by Orthodox Jews who send their children to private yeshivas.
Mr. St. Lawrence’s critics say his support from the ultra-Orthodox population has allowed him to ignore other voters’ concerns, as on the ballpark, so long as he promotes housing and development benefiting his supporters.
“It’s the same way with every decision — with the ballpark, with any zoning decision, with everything they do,” said Deborah Munitz, a board member of Ramapo Organized for Sustainability and a Safe Aquifer, which is fighting the development plans for the 200-acre Patrick Farm property. “They walk in, they have their agenda, and they don’t really listen to anybody.”
But Yossi Gestetner, who does public relations work for ultra-Orthdox groups and businesses, said that Mr. St. Lawrence had done a good job of navigating diverse interests, and that critics were mostly just fighting change and growth.
“Once upon a time Manhattan was not developed either,” he said. “Is there a rule on the books that a certain place needs to be rural from now to eternity?
“I understand that many people moved here for the rural environment and even many of the Hasidim feel there’s too much development. But anyone who owns property — if they don’t like it, if they feel the taxes are too much — they can sell their property for two or three times what they would have gotten 15 years ago, and this is the direct result of the growth in the Jewish community and the changes allowing more development.”
Still, he said, he knows nothing about the investigation and would not condone any illegalities if any were found.
Others say the political culture in Ramapo is so out of whack, an implosion was inevitable.
“There’s no place in America where the body politic votes on whether they want a ballpark, 70 percent say no and the elected leaders do it anyway,” said Joe Meyers, a Democratic county legislator and a member of Preserve Ramapo, which is critical of Mr. St. Lawrence. “That’s Russia. That’s Syria. But it’s what happens when someone gets the bloc vote, and he’s not answering to the voters. He’s answering to a small group of people, and as long as he gives them the favors they want, he can do whatever he wants.”
