News

The Rockland County Legislature voted along party lines 10-7 Tuesday to hold what’s being billed as a “Rockland’s Future” summit next year. The summit would include meetings that bring community leaders and residents together to focus on issues that are tearing the community apart. The meetings will likely focus on overdevelopment, anti-Semitism and other expressions of hate, local schools, home values, poverty, assimilation versus segregation and cultural diversity.

A controversial high-density housing development has been approved by the Ramapo Zoning Board of Appeals. Lohud.com says the Bluefield Extension would include 15 to 20 units on about an acre off Union Road, across the street from the Bluefield complex of multiple family townhouses. The project’s been in the works for more than five years. The local CUPON activist group is considering taking legal action against the project.

$10,000 is being offered by the family of a cab driver for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in his June murder. That’s according to the Journal News. International Taxi driver 28 year-old Luis Guaman-Espinoza was found in the back of his cab with multiple gunshot wounds. He had been parked behind CVS off Old Nyack Turnpike, near Chestnut Ridge Village Hall. If you have information call Ramapo Police detectives at 845-357-4626.

Convicted felon Anthony Mallia, Ramapo’s former building inspector has been removed by the Spring Valley Board of Trustees as Mayor Alan Simon’s top aide after they voted against amending his contract, which has been maxed out. The Journal News says Simon can try to get the board to vote again, but he’s already failed two other times. Mallia was hired in January last year after pleading guilty to undercharging contractors for permits and shortchanging taxpayers by $150,000. He got five years’ probation, but no jail time. He originally faced a 188-count indictment, which included dozens of felony counts of falsifying and tampering with business records.

The New York state Democratic Party is allegedly recruiting people to oppose the fusion voting system that’s been in place for decades in the state, and that has an area lawmaker seeing red. According to a recent article on Politico.com, the Public Finance Reform Commission, which is supposed to be studying and fixing how elections are funded, has been asking committee members to speak out against fusion voting, the process by which major party candidates can also run on minor party lines at the same time. Assemblyman Colin Schmitt says the commission is trying to do the state legislature’s job…

Schmitt notes that the chairman of the State Democratic Committee, Jay Jacobs, is also on the public financing commission. Schmitt, a Republican, says the entire commission should be dissolved.