The Platform

Clarkstown borrowed roughly $28 million across 50 separate decisions in 2025 and 2026, including photocopiers, office software and a timeclock system. Each is repaid over years, with interest, out of property taxes. None of the 50 went to a public vote, and every one of them keeps your tax bill rising for years after the equipment is gone.

Town debt went from $112 million at the end of 2020 to about $156 million in December 2025.1

Separately, on a $9 million energy contract, a contractor billed the town $680,320 for labor and marked the job finished. Its own payroll records accounted for about $85,850 of that. The town’s Director of Engineering reported the $594,469 difference and was put on leave.2 Nobody has explained it.

Reading a contract against a payroll and asking who was paid for what is the specific thing Susan did for 34 years.

Two hundred residents came out against the Route 303 warehouse plan in July 2026. The Planning Board chairman’s answer was that the plan follows the zoning rules, so it could not be refused.3

The Town Board writes that zoning. Residents were told what the rules already allowed, after the application, rather than asked what the rules should be, before it.

Residents should be asked what the rules should be, while the decision is still open and can still change. Not told afterwards what the rules already allowed.

The Route 303 plan puts three warehouses on 41 wooded acres along Ward 3’s eastern edge. More than 1,600 trees removed and five acres of wetlands touched, to put 342 diesel truck trips a day onto Clarkstown streets and their exhaust into the neighborhoods they pass.3

Meanwhile the housing the town said it wanted has not arrived. Clarkstown’s 2021 plan for the town’s future called for 1,500 senior homes.4 Developers were lining up to build them that same year.5 Five years later barely any have been built, and parents who raised families here still have no affordable options to move into.

Overdevelopment and under-building are the same failure: building what a developer proposes instead of what the town decided it needed.