Annexation of land to Blooming Grove may not go forward, court rules

MONROE – A State Supreme Court justice has ruled that efforts to annex land from the Town of Monroe into the Town of Blooming Grove and Village of South Blooming Grove may not proceed until the issue of the annexation of 507 acres of land from Monroe to the Village of Kiryas Joel is resolved.
A group of Kiryas Joel residents filed the legal action against the others, noting their annexation efforts involved 336 of the same acres of land as in the initial land transfer proposal.
In the court papers, Kiryas Joel’s Village Administrator and Village Clerk Gedalye Szegedin, said the Blooming Grove/South Blooming Grove petitions “were filed for the illegitimate purpose of thwarting the KJ petitions and should not be compelled to compete with the BG/SBG petitions.” He argued that “the just and orderly administration of government requires that the KJ petition be permitted to proceed to conclusion before new overlapping annexation petitions are heard.”
The attorney for the Village of Kiryas Joel contended that the second set of petitioners “could have drawn the boundaries of their proposed annexation to Blooming Grove and South Blooming Grove in such a way to exclude any of the territory proposed to be annexed to Kiryas Joel.”
Supreme Court Justice Francesca Connolly ruled that the second set of annexation petitioners are prohibited from moving forward “until such time as proceedings on the petitioners’ earlier-filed annexation petition are finally concluded.”