The Wine Wars: The Unrelenting Wannabe Vintners Return - On Chatham’s Dime

They Don’t Want to File An Article 78 - They Want Another Bite At The Apple - And They Want The Apple For Free

It happened.

Lawrence Howard, Esq., of Shulman Howard & McPherson LLP in Averill Park (yes, Averill Park, not exactly the Cravath letterhead one might hope for at a moment like this) has written to the Town of Chatham Zoning Board of Appeals on behalf of Fox Hill Estate and Winery LLC. Fourteen days after the ZBA voted 4-0 to send Edwin and Cherie Williams’ tasting room dreams into the long good night. They are back at the trough. It is not the right trough.

Howard wants a rehearing. Of course he does. A rehearing is free. The actual legal remedy for a party aggrieved by a zoning board’s decision is an Article 78 petition in Columbia County Supreme Court. That is not free.

This is the part nobody is saying out loud, so let’s say it. The Williamses live in an 8,300-square-foot pile on 53.7 acres listed at $5.65 million. They have an unfenced pool. An outdoor kitchen. A greenhouse. They have a separate garage they would like to convert into a venue where strangers will pay them money to drink wine they may have made, on a vineyard of 100 to 400 vines. They have the money to do this the right way. They just do not feel like spending it.

So Chatham get’s the Leona Helmsley special. Only the little people pay.

Their tenacity is really what should be bottled.

What they also have is a lawyer in Averill Park who has presumably explained to them what an Article 78 actually costs. Filing fee, $210. Then transcripts. A verified petition. A certified record. Briefs. Hours. Fifty thousand dollars, easy. Six figures by the time it ends.

And so they are doing what people of a certain ilk always do. They are trying to get someone else to pay.

.

The someone else is Chatham. The costs to the town are real.

A rehearing under Town Law §267-a(12) requires no filing fee. None. Zero. The ZBA Clerk, paid by Chatham taxpayers, will notice the meeting and prepare the packet. The Town’s attorney, paid by Chatham taxpayers, will read Howard’s letter and draft a new resolution. The five volunteer ZBA members, who already gave Fox Hill four months of their evenings free of charge while the Williamses’ lawyer billed by the hour, will be asked to give them four more. The Town Hall will be heated and lit. The neighbors, who already showed up on a freezing January night to speak against this project, will be asked to show up again. On their own time. After their own workdays. So that Edwin and Cherie can save themselves the cost of a lawsuit they are clearly already planning to file. Howard reserves rights at the close of his letter. That is lawyer for: we will see you in court.

Now, the law. The law is worse than the optics, if you can believe it.

Town Law §267-a(12) requires unanimity. The vote against Fox Hill was 4-0, with one member absent. Howard is asking those same four members to unanimously declare they were wrong about a determination they spent four months reaching. His “primary basis” is the property’s inclusion in Agricultural District 10.

Pause there. That inclusion is the punchline of a longer joke. Ag District 10 was the prize at the end of a different play, the one where the Williamses suddenly discovered they were farmers. You all remember Cherie’s 303-B filing. The horses appeared. The cows appeared. The barn complexes were narrated into existence. The hay lease with the town supervisor materialized. None of it amounts to a working farm in the eyes of anyone who has ever met one, but it was enough paper to get the County Board of Supervisors to fold the property into Ag District 10 by resolution. The process managed so discreetly by Supervisor Collins, aka the Williamses’ business partner. That was Act One. The tasting room was always Act Two. And now Howard is using Act One as his legal theory for rescuing Act Two.

The ZBA saw this coming. Paragraph 2 of the March 30 Resolution, in writing, with clarity that does not invite revision: the Ag District inclusion “has no bearing on the proceedings or determinations,” and “at no time has Fox Hill or its representatives sought or been given any consideration that may flow from such inclusion.” Translation: we know what you did, and we are not going to let it count.

We all knew this plan Ed and Donal hatched would come back like a rabid raccoon ready to bite. Here it is.

Howard read paragraph 2. He read it, and then wrote a letter asking the Board to reconsider on the basis they had explicitly told him was off the table. This is not advocacy. This is performance. The kind of performance a lawyer puts on when he knows the client has decided to litigate but wants to bill for one more round first.

The substance is even more threadbare. Howard concedes the dwelling is the “principal structure.” In writing. He then asks the Board to consider whether it is also the principal use, on a property whose principal structure is a 7,286-square-foot mansion with a pool and an outdoor kitchen, where the agricultural use consists of 400 grape plants on roughly one percent of the parcel, producing fewer bottles annually than a midsize wedding party drinks before the entrée. He invokes Agriculture and Markets Law §305-a, which forbids municipalities from unreasonably restricting farm operations. Somewhere in Ghent a dairy farmer who was up at 5 a.m. on Easter morning is being told that her statutory protections are now being conscripted to subsidize a tasting room for a five-and-a-half-million-dollar estate that didn’t have a farm until it needed one. I wonder if Howard learned about §305-a before this newsletter or because of it. That has been my fear all along.

The closer is pure choreography. Howard writes that the matter “arises from an interpretation of the Zoning Enforcement Officer’s determination,” and that broader land use considerations can be addressed later, in site plan review. Translation: please pretend the public hearing didn’t happen. Eight residents spoke against the project. A Town Board member testified that the use was commercial. The ZBA, in an unusual move that tells you everything about the temperature in that room, stated for the record that the Town Board member’s comments were “ignored and did not in any way influence” their deliberations. Howard is now asking the Board to scrub a record they have already scrubbed, on the record, in writing.

Back to the money, because that is the only thing that matters here.

The Williamses can afford the courthouse. The courthouse is in Hudson. It is open weekdays from 9 to 5. The filing fee is $210, which is roughly the cost of a single bottle from one of the wineries they presumably aspire to imitate. They can afford Lawrence Howard, Esq. They have already retained him. What they apparently cannot afford, or, more precisely, what they have decided they would prefer not to spend, is the cost of the legal remedy New York State has established for parties in their exact situation. They would rather Chatham foot the bill. They would rather the volunteer board, the Town attorney, the Town clerk, and the neighbors absorb the cost of one more bite at the apple before the Williamses decide whether they feel like writing a real check.

The harm is not just the principle. A town of four thousand people with a volunteer ZBA does not exist to provide free dispute resolution services to mansion-dwellers who lost fair and square and would prefer not to pay for the appeal they are entitled to file. Every hour the Town’s attorney spends on this letter is an hour Chatham taxpayers are paying for. This is exactly how people with money have always operated when they don’t get their way. They make it expensive for everyone else until everyone else gives up.

The ZBA should vote no on rehearing. Unanimously. Within ten minutes. And let’s not forget what the Planning Board has still never seen. The long-promised site plan. The parking layout. The vine count. The lighting plan. The SEQR review. None of it. After four months of meetings, the file is still empty.

So Lawrence Howard, Esq., should drive back to Averill Park, find Hudson on a map, and explain to his clients how the Article 78 process works.

The question is when the Town of Chatham will require Edwin and Cherie Williams to do what every other applicant has to do. Planning Board. Studies. Notify the neighbors. Environmental review. Pay the filing fee. Stand in the same line.

And not for nothing - that still hidden relationship between Ed and Donal - no matter what it’s worth, it was money well paid.

It seems to me theres a feral hog problem up on Bashford and everyone knows they can’t be managed.

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