A five year effort to establish a new village outside of Kiryas Joel was shot down in September, after leaders of the town of Monroe identified technical flaws in the village’s formation petition. 

The proposed village of Seven Springs was to occupy 1,216 acres of residential and undeveloped space along the southern and western borders of Kiryas Joel. Driving the proposal was a mixture of real estate investors and local Satmar Hasidim. Unusual for a proposed Hasidic development, the opposition came not just from non-Hasidic residents nearby, but also from Hasidic leaders of Kiryas Joel, as Shtetl previously reported.

The village seemed all but assured to become reality, as current New York State law only allows petitions for village creation to be rejected on technical grounds. However, a technical fault with the petition is exactly what Tony Cardone, the town supervisor of Monroe, says he found in the petition to form Seven Springs.

Cardone said that the rejection was for lack of legal clarity in the petition about the proposed borders for Seven Springs. “A written description of the proposed village failed to utilize a metes and bounds description as required by NYS Village Law,” Cardone told News 12 the Bronx, “Instead, the village description relied predominantly on tax [lot] lines.” Because some of those tax lot lines were outside the borders of Monroe, the town claimed, it could not determine the exact borders of the proposed village.

The rapidly-growing Hasidic population in and around Kiryas Joel has generated a variety of efforts to expand Hasidic control of the area. Whereas in 2000, the total population of Kiryas Joel was just over thirteen thousand, that number had nearly tripled by 2020, to more than thirty-two thousand.

The leaders of Kiryas Joel negotiated an expansion of the town in 2017, amid a settlement with Monroe groups that included an agreement not to expand further for 10 years. The Seven Springs effort is led by others, most prominently real estate professional Herman Wagschal. 

The Seven Springs effort faced obstacles from Monroe leadership and Cardone. He first claimed not to have been aware of the petition for the village’s formation until the year after it was filed. In 2020, a court ruled in favor of the Seven Springs effort after Cardone attempted to deny the formation petition on the grounds that Wagschal did not make a specific payment when filing, even though the Seven Springs effort had deposits of cash with the town that exceeded the filing fee.

As to whether or not the Seven Springs effort will be revived with a new petition that avoids the technical pitfall that sunk the most recent one, Wagshal told News 12, “We’ll see.”

If a new Seven Springs effort does gain steam, it could face an additional challenge from the New York State Government. A bill passed both chambers of the state legislature this year, which would increase the number of people required to petition for village incorporation to 2,000 from its current threshold of 500, as well as require greater scrutiny of taxes and services related to a proposed village. The bill requires Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature to become law, however, and she has not indicated whether she plans to sign the bill or veto it.