ATTENTION PIERMONT, ORANGETOWN, AND ROCKLAND COUNTY: Please attend this coming Tuesday
night’s Piermont Village Hall meeting and Public Hearing at 7:00 PM. As indicated in the
below Piermont Village Hall public notices, embittered departing Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker is
seeking to pull the pin on Tuesday night. As you can also see from the
below public notices, Piermont Village Hall and Tucker have issued
conflicting communications, one citing a 7:15 PM start-time, but with another
citing a different 7:00 PM start-time. It is recommended that you please attend the
meeting and Public Hearing at the earliest possible time, and check the
Piermont village government website before traveling to Village Hall:
https://www.piermont-ny.gov/
What do I mean by “pull the pin”? Well, “pulling the
pin”, when taken literally in other instances, is a militaristic or law
enforcement expression evocative of violence and carnage - in the sense of an
enemy combatant soldier or terrorist resigned to his own extinction pulling out
the pin of a hand-grenade in order to take as many innocents with him as
possible.
Yet as a metaphor, “pulling the pin” can also describe the unwanted adversarial
actions of a disgruntled terminated employee, or a domestic partner departing
in anger, or any other malicious saboteur intent upon making his mark
when leaving. That said, meet exiting Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker. Tucker has already indicated
to News 12 that he is not running for re-election:
Moreover, according to the
Rockland County Board of Elections, no petitions were timely submitted this past week in
support of any Bruce Tucker primary bid towards re-election. Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker
already has one foot out the door – and he knows that he was driven out.
Accompanying this Blog post below are seven (7) “.jpeg”
documents - comprised of three (3) Piermont Village Hall documents titled
“Notice Of Public Hearing”, plus one (1) supplemental notice posted to a
different location on the Piermont Village Hall website regarding the so-called
“Piermont Comprehensive Plan”. Take them together as one packet.
The take-away? Departing Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker is trying to ram-through dramatic and harmful
changes to Piermont before he leaves office.
When you scrutinize the below seven (7)
“.jpeg” documents, here is what you can deduce:
1. The “Tax Cap” Notice.
Bruce Tucker and his unsavory pals on the Village of Piermont Board of Trustees are setting up Piermont resident taxpayers for a new and major incremental tax hit this summer, once again busting
through the tax levy limit or “tax cap”. You may recall that Tucker and his Village
Hall cronies did this to Piermont taxpaying residents last year as well, leading to a tax increase of
6.9% and up:
Since then, we learned that Tucker misspent Piermont into what is
roughly a US$9,000,000 Net Position retrograde hole, since he took mayoral office
in 2018:
Since then, we also learned that the iconic Piermont Pier tip, perhaps the greatest attraction in Rockland County, is crumbling
into the Hudson River, and that it will cost millions of dollars to rebuild or
fix it. This was due to Bruce Tucker's failure to regularly and timely cause inspections to the Piermont Pier during his failed mayoral reign since 2018:
Piermont resident taxpayers could be hit with a massive Bruce Tucker tax increase in a few
short weeks - and in fairness, the responsibility for that will be the responsibility of the Piermont residents unless they show up on Tuesday night and vociferously oppose Mayor Tucker’s recidivist busting of the tax cap.
2. “Lead Agency”. You
will see that the last substantive paragraph of the Tax Cap Notice seeks to
establish the Piermont Board of Trustees as “Lead Agency” for environmental law
purposes. This text looks so incongruous relative to the tax cap verbiage
preceding it, that a reader will wonder if it was actually included in the Tax
Cap Notice by mistake. Yet the “Lead Agency” paragraph is included in each of
the three accompanying “Notice Of Public Hearing” documents, and that is not a
good thing for anyone, in any of the three contexts. Bruce Tucker is the same guy who
wants to allow the construction of an ugly three-story building that looks like
a “Motel 6” or a “Super 8”, upon the site of a former Sunoco gasoline station
that had underground gasoline tanks:
Allowing Bruce Tucker and his Village Hall
minions to seize “Lead Agency” status on any environmental matter, would
be the equivalent of designating Ernest Hemingway as one's sobriety coach:
https://unhandpiermont.blogspot.com/2025/02/no-mayor-theres-nothing-kind-of-funny.html
3. The Parking Notice.
In the accompanying second “Notice Of Public Hearing”, you will see that Bruce
Tucker and his Village Hall sycophants are also hastening to eliminate the
parking in front of 453 Piermont Avenue. This is a direct assault on, and insult to, local
businesses and local residents.
4. The “CBM” And “FILOP” Notice.
The accompanying third “Notice Of Public Hearing” is the most offensive and the
most unlawful. The therein-described initiative seeks to edit the phrase “village owned” out of
the Piermont Village Code in connection with the ill-conceived Piermont “FILOP” program. However,
in classic and now-predictable Bruce Tucker “Trojan Horse” fashion, this third notice
once again seeks to resuscitate the dead “Central Business Multi-Use” or “CBM”
Zoning District through subterfuge. Departing Mayor Bruce Tucker thereby seeks to somehow validate the infamous 447-477 Piermont Avenue construction project which virtually no one in Piermont other than Tucker actually wants. Bruce Tucker and the “Comprehensive
Plan Committee” have been pulling this same numbing recidivist shenanigan over
the past several months when repeatedly seeking to re-introduce “CBM” textual references
into multiple successive drafts of the Piermont Comprehensive Plan, too. Yet
what Tucker and his contemptible Village Hall toadies are doing in this regard,
is completely unlawful. On October 10, 2024, Honorable Hal B. Greenwald, Justice
of the New York State Supreme Court, ordered and adjudged that the CBM District was null,
void, and jurisdictionally invalid. Young et al. v. Village of
Piermont (Sup. Ct. Rockland Co., Index #032252-2024):
https://unhandpiermont.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-courts-decision-in-young-v-village.html
That's right. By law, the CBM does
not exist, and never existed. Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker’s continued efforts to revivify CBM
are violative of Justice Greenwald’s October 10, 2024 decision, and violative
of the now-settled law of Rockland County and New York State.
5. The Comprehensive Plan
Notice. The Piermont Comprehensive Plan is an amateurish initiative:
We all know what is happening. The Comprehensive Plan - and its embedded CBM land-mine - are being bum-rushed
at Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker’s behest. Tucker is but a one-trick pony. His Trojan Horse ploy is to
sneak-in the awful 447-477 Piermont Avenue over-development. Again, the 447-477 Piermont
Avenue project is intended to be built over the site of a former Sunoco
gasoline station which had underground gasoline tanks:
This would make Tucker’s
attempt to seize environmental “Lead Agency” status laughable if it were not
such a deadly serious matter otherwise. In any event, the Piermont
Comprehensive Plan cannot and should not move forward until and after exiting
Mayor Bruce Tucker and his Piermont Village Hall flunkies are long gone from office. These
feckless faux-bureaucrats cannot be trusted with a set of decisions this
massive, which will have such long-lasting impact on the Village of Piermont
throughout all of our respective lives and beyond. Moreover, what Tucker and his gang are collectively doing, is nothing other than purposefully-deceptive and malicious. That is the only way that they govern.
With this memo I am asking everyone who cares about the beautiful and historic Village of Piermont to please attend the multi-topic meeting and Public Hearing
currently scheduled for this coming Tuesday, April 15, 2025, at 7:00 PM at
Piermont Village Hall. At this meeting and Public Hearing please take
every lawful opportunity during any "Public Comment" period to voice your clamorous opposition to the matters
iterated in the three “Notice Of Public Hearing” documents, to the “CBM Zone”, to
the “Piermont Comprehensive Plan”, to the 447-477 Piermont Avenue over-development,
and to Mayor Bruce Tucker's failed and despicable mayoral regime generally.
Bruce Tucker needs
to hear it from you. It’s time.
Piermont Mayor Bruce Tucker is in the process of ruining the Village of Piermont. The damage to the village could be inflicted permanently
at Tuesday night’s meeting and Public Hearing. Mayor Tucker intends to ram these
manifold awful initiatives through, leaving no
alternative other than further expensive litigation in the courts. Yet the
outcome of litigation is always uncertain. In other words, Piermont could be lost to over-development and other harm, this coming Tuesday night.
All
because Bruce Tucker is pulling the pin.
Thank you for your careful consideration of this
all-important matter.
Please attend Tuesday night’s meeting and Public
Hearing. The future of Piermont is once again at stake.
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Founder, “Unhand Piermont!”
