Their attitude is "if you don't like it, YOU move away"!!
They have overbuilt and over populated the area...Put an incredible strain on the infrastructure..want the taxes of the long time residents to pay for special education for their children...and do not want to pay their fair share of the taxes.
They milk the system for everything they can...It is one of the most poverty stricken communities in the country...no one works and they all have 12 children. They had a special PUBLIC school district created to service only their children who needed special education.
They make me ashamed as well as infuriated.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_YorkPopulation growth is strong.
In 1990, there were 7,400 people in Kiryas Joel; in 2000, 13,100, nearly doubling the population. In 2005, the population had risen to 18,300, a rate of growth suggesting it will double again in the ten years between 2000 and 2010.<5> In 2006, village administrator Gedalye Szegedin stated:
“
There are three religious tenets that drive our growth: our women don't use birth control, they get married young and after they get married, they stay in Kiryas Joel and start a family. Our growth comes simply from the fact that our families have a lot of babies, and we need to build homes to respond to the needs of our community. . . . As each successive generation of women becomes old enough to have children, the number of women of child-bearing age grows exponentially. The number of women who marry each year is the approximate number of new homes needed.<5><snip>
Kiryas Joel played a major role in the 2006 Congressional election. The village sits in the 19th Congressional District, represented at that time by Republican Sue Kelly. Village residents had been loyal to Kelly in the past, but in 2006, voters were upset over what they saw as lack of adequate representation from Kelly for the village.
In a bloc, Kiryas Joel swung around 2,900 votes to Kelly's Democratic opponent, John Hall in that year's election. The vote in Kiryas Joel was a major reason Hall carried Orange County, as he defeated Kelly in the county by 93 votes<snip>
Women in Kiryas Joel usually stop working outside the home after the birth of a second child.<5> Most families have only one income and many children.
The resulting poverty rate makes a disproportionate number of families in Kiryas Joel eligible for welfare benefits when compared to the rest of the county; and cost of welfare benefits is subsidized by taxes paid county-wide. The New York Times wrote,
“ Because of the sheer size of the families (the average household here has six people, but it is not uncommon for couples to have 8 or 10 children), and because a vast majority of households subsist on only one salary,
62 percent of the local families live below poverty level and rely heavily on public assistance -government welfare-, which is another sore point among those who live in neighboring communities.<5>
<snip>
The unusual lifestyle and growth pattern of Kiryas Joel has led to litigation on a number of fronts. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet that
the Kiryas Joel school district, which covered only the village, was designed in violation of the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, because the design accommodated one group on the basis of religious affiliation. 512 U.S. 687 (1994). Subsequently, the New York State Legislature established a similar school district in the town that has passed legal muster.<9> Further litigation has resulted over what entity should pay for the education of children with disabilities in Kiryas Joel, and over whether the community's boys must ride buses driven by women.<5>
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http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/09/state-and-municipal-politicos.htmlTucked within the Catskill Mountains, the tiny village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., is best known for its almost exclusively Hasidic Jewish population and sky-high poverty rate.
Kiryas Joel has also this year spent as much of its own money to lobby the federal government -- $140,000 -- as cities exponentially larger, such as Chicago, Dallas and Tucson, Ariz. how does THAT jive with the fact that 62% of the population live BELOW the poverty level and get public assistance!!!____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.vosizneias.com/57838/2010/06/15/kiryas-joel-ny-assessors-crackdown-leads-to-50-properties-off-tax-exemption/
Kiryas Joel, NY - A shopping center, a five-story office building and dozens of other Kiryas Joel properties could lose at least part of their property-tax exemptions as the result of a crackdown by the Town of Monroe assessor’s office.
Fifty parcels with a combined market value of nearly $52 million have been tentatively placed on the town tax rolls and will get their first bills for town and county taxes come January unless they prove their exemptions were warranted.
The properties range widely in value and include homes that claimed exemption as synagogues; apartment complexes for low-income tenants; and the village’s two most conspicuous commercial centers: its bustling shopping strip on Forest Road and the 80,000-square-foot Business Center that opened on Bakertown Road in 2008.
The strip mall has never been taxed since it opened in 1987 because its owners were deemed exempt. The village government owned the property for years until transferring it in 2004 to a real estate arm of the United Talmudical Academy, the religious school system for thousands of children in the Satmar Hasidic community.
http://www.vosizneias.com/27288/2009/02/12/kiryas-joel-ny-63-million-stimulus-aid-for-kj-school-district-would-be-largest-in-region/
Kiryas Joel, NY - The region’s smallest school district will get more federal aid than any other in Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties under the formulas used to distribute education funding in the impending economic stimulus package.
Excluding the school construction funding that has largely been dropped from the plan, the Kiryas Joel School District, which serves about 280 special-education students and has a roughly $13 million budget this year, will get $6.3 million in stimulus money over two years, according to aid figures provided by Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office.
By comparison, the projected funding totals, minus construction money, for the area’s two largest districts will be $5.5 million for Newburgh, which has an enrollment of roughly 12,230, and $2 million for Monroe-Woodbury, which serves more than 7,500 students.
The explanation for that disparity lies in federal education programs that would drive the funding: Title I, which is for low-income students; and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which is for special-education students.
Targeting the aid that way inevitably directs an inordinate share to Kiryas Joel, a school district that exclusively serves special-needs children in a community with high poverty rates.
The Senate version of the stimulus package dropped $20 billion in school construction funding from the House bill and trimmed $40 billion from the $79 billion that would go to states to avoid chopping spending on education and other areas.
The $790 billion compromise plan announced yesterday largely sided with the Senate on those changes, restoring just $4 billion for school construction and $5 billion to the so-called state stabilization funds.