Town of Wawayanda Democratic Committee - WayDems.org

You Deserve Better 

The current supervisor, Mr. John Razzano, and his supporters won their election on lies and continue to manage our town with lies, suppression of information and unethical behavior.

Lie Number 1: When running for supervisor, Mr. Razzano had printed on the back of his pickup truck that the town should be prepared for a “37 1/2 %  tax increase” if Mr. Skinner was re-elected. Mr. Dave Cole, in a recent Letter to the Editor of the Times-Herald Record, repeated this lie when he said that the previous administration had raised taxes. In fact: Under Mr. Skinner, taxes went down by 4.64%!

Lie Number 2 : While running for office, Mr. Razzano and his cronies stated that there would be no surplus in the Town's treasury when Mr. Skinner's administration left office. He was also known to say that the town was going to be left totally bankrupt. Once again, Mr. Cole repeated this lie in his Letter to the Editor when he stated that “the Town of Wawayanda was left in a difficult situation as 2006 started—there was little surplus money left over from the previous administration.”  In fact: Mr. Razzano  recently stated publicly that our town enjoyed a $469,000 surplus from the last administration. Hardly “little surplus money left over,” Mr. Cole.

Lie Number 3 : In his Letter to the Editor, Mr. Cole stated that the current Town Board has instituted “several programs to encourage new and managed commercial/residential growth in town.”  What programs are those, Mr. Cole, that weren't already put in place by Mr. Skinner's administration?

Lie Number 4 :Mr. Razzano stated that he dismissed the original Master Plan Committee and installed people of his own choosing because he wanted a more “diverse” composition of the Committee.  In fact: The original committee was made up of volunteers of varied political persuasions and varied educations, experience, professions and income. They came from old Wawayanda families, families that have been here 20 years or more and families that have been here less than 10 years. They own three acres and they own more that 20 acres. They had often attended Town Board and Planning Board meetings before their membership in the committee. This committee invited experts to nearly every meeting to teach them about water resources, package plants, commercial possibilities in Orange County, school issues and other knowledge that was necessary to produce an intelligent Master Plan that would best serve the Town. But perhaps the most important contribution of the original committee was their compilation of a townwide survey from the surveys of 13 other Towns in order to find out what the citizens of Wawayanda wanted to have in their new Master Plan.

            As a contrast, not only was Mr. Razzano's new committee not “diverse,” but it was made up of his political allies, none of whom had EVEN ONCE attended a previous Master Plan Committee meeting or Town Board meetings. They did not have the experience of compiling the townwide survey and recording the responses as they came back from the townspeople. They did not have experts come in to inform them. Their meetings consist only of discussions directed by the planning firm of Saratoga Associates, which in turn is given direction by Mr. Razzano and the current Town Board.

Information to the community from Mr. Razzano, Mr. Cole and their cronies on the Board has been slow in coming, misleading, inaccurate or nonexistent.

Accurate information about the new Master Plan, before it was voted on by the Board, was not posted on the Town web site until the day before the vote. Even then, the zoning maps were still inaccurate.

The hearing on Local Law #3 was held the same day that the first vote on the law was taken, so that none of the input from the townspeople could have been considered and incorporated. Mr. Razzano  went to great lengths to avoid incorporating the recommendations of the Orange County Planning Department into Local Law #3. These recommendations were highly critical of the law as it was written because it provided no protection to the Town of its valuable resources such as water, slopes and wetlands. The law was written and submitted to the O. C. Planning department right before the Town moratorium was about to expire, instead of in a timely fashion. In spite of this chicanery, there would still have been enough time to incorporate the necessary protective measures, but Mr. Razzano directed the representative of Saratoga Associates to not tell the public at the meeting of this possibility. Even after Gail Soro, the sole Democratic member of the Board, who was against this developer friendly/anti-Town law, attempted to get the O. C. Planning Board’s protective suggestions incorporated into the law, Mr. Razzano and his cronies refused to write in the protective measures. Mr. Cole even made a motion to WAIVE public reading of the new Law #3 before its passage so that the people would not understand that this Board was going around the recommendations of the Orange County Planning Dept.

Finally, Mr. Razzano, Mr. Cole, and Mr. Penaluna continue to vote on issues such as The Master Plan, Local Law #3 and the Cultural Resource Management law in direct violation of the Town’s Ethics Code. This code states that a Town official must not vote on any issue that directly affects his own interests. Since Mr. Cole is a real estate dealer who is currently developing land in the Town, Mr. Razzano is a contractor currently developing land in the Town, and Mr. Penaluna owns a concrete company which is involved with many development projects within the town, they should not be voting on issues relating to development of the Town.

Yes, Mr. Razzano and Mr. Cole, you and the rest of your team have made us a “builder friendly” town by voting in laws that put the keys to our future in the hands of the developers rather than into the hands of our Planning Board and our town citizens.

With lies you came in and with lies you continue. You have not listened to all the people who stand up at Town Board meetings urging the Board to keep our town rural. You have not listened to the wishes very clearly expressed by our residents in the Town survey. You and your developer supporters have too much to lose by listening.