Arthur Henry Gunther III

After the latest news morsel that a Jewish girls academy is buying a former Baptist church in Nanuet, the Rockland community excitement meter jumped once again — accelerated by social media and its rapid pulse rate — with deep rumors as well as the legitimate angst of suburbia.

This will happen again.

It is past time that local leaders address the general concern about religious needs' growth by devising a reasonable, workable but thoroughly balanced plan going forward that is acceptable to everyone, including the religious.

At stake are resources, quality of life, the tax load and the suburban concept. Haphazard, uncontrolled growth is not sustainable. It will foster prejudice. It will be costly. It will tear at the social fabric.

Of course, all must be welcome in Rockland, known since before the Revolution as a diverse land. But there must be reasonableness to the continuing immense growth.

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The Town of Ramapo is the example of what not to do: Since the late 1950s, the religious community has greatly expanded housing and schools to meet population expansion; two Hasidic villages have been formed in exclusivity; satellite housing, many schools and synagogues have bypassed traditional master plans and orderly growth; and at times these structures have been in violation of building and fire codes. Public school funding and administration are challenged in East Ramapo by a board elected by the religious. Such growth does not responsibly consider the full community. The needs of the religious must be addressed, yes, but in balance.

What has happened in Ramapo — accelerated growth replacing single-family homes on small lots with multi-story units; heavy use of existing water and sewer systems; and greatly added traffic — all this has created an imbalance in suburban living.

Those who chose to move to Ramapo, perhaps to escape dense city living, maybe to share in the American dream, those very people who funded expensive master plans to reasonably control zoning both to protect their investments and to maintain their way of life, are left out of any possible balance.

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The poorly crafted federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act says they cannot have their zoning, that it can be bypassed for religious "needs," a broad definition. If the people or their leaders sue and lose, they must pay the challenger's legal costs, itself seemingly thwarting due process. The law, meant to protect against disenfranchising a group, actually disenfranchises others. And it opens the door to unbalanced growth.

Such growth, with all its economic and life-altering effects, promotes prejudice, and in Ramapo's case, some anti-Semitism, ironic because post-war Rockland has seen increasing diversity and acceptance of many ethnic, religious and other groups. And Ramapo itself has in three centuries lived side by side with the Orthodox.

Yes, the rights of all must be recognized and underscored. Yes, there must be room for those of all faiths and no faith at all. But there must also be absolute recognition by residents and leaders that there cannot be unreasonable, unrelenting growth that changes suburban living, that hikes taxes and overloads services, that violates safety codes, that threatens public education funding and administration.

The Ramapo mistakes — deliberately ignored by the town — must not be repeated in the other four Rockland towns. Leaders there, brought together by the county executive and with Jewish religious leaders included, must agree to meet in consortium to develop rock-solid plans for reasonable growth, with agreed-upon development limits; with phased-in construction according to available services; with zoning that does not greatly modify master plans. Religious leaders must agree to control expansion.

In other words, one word: Balance. Absent that, Rockland will see growth that it cannot afford, that is too dense, that is unmanageable, that will foster prejudice.



The writer, a Blauvelt resident, is a retired Rockland Editorial Page Editor for The Journal News and lohud.com.

