The Record

The mall's tax bill was cut nearly in half.

Palisades Center challenged its property taxes and won. Clarkstown, Rockland County and the school district refunded $27.5 million to the owner, and the mall’s taxable value dropped from $578 million to $300 million.1

The mall sits in West Nyack, in Ward 3.

The town still has to raise the same amount of money. When the largest commercial property in Clarkstown is taxed on half its former value, the missing money is made up by everybody else, and homeowners are most of everybody else. Your property tax bill goes up so a corporation’s can go down. The school district alone absorbed $18 million.

In February 2026 the mall sold for $175 million, $125 million below the value the town had just agreed to.2 The new owner can point at that sale price and ask for another cut, and homeowners would pay the difference again.

Three warehouses approved, and 342 diesel trucks a day through our neighborhoods.

Three warehouses on 41 wooded acres along Route 303. More than 1,600 trees removed and five acres of wetlands touched, to put 342 diesel truck trips a day onto Clarkstown streets, in the exhaust of the neighborhoods they pass.3

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

The town board writes that zoning. It has not been updated for what Route 303 has become.

Safety on Routes 303 and 304 has been studied for two years and not fixed.

In January 2023 a 21-year-old woman was struck and killed crossing Route 304 at Clearview Road in New City.4

The town and county began studying how to make Routes 303 and 304 safer in 2024.5 Two years later the study has produced no funded crossing, no cleared sight line and no connected stretch of sidewalk. Nothing has been built.

Route 303 runs along Ward 3’s eastern edge, and it is the road the warehouse plan sits on. The town has spent two years studying how to make it safer while approving a plan that would add 342 diesel trucks a day to it. The road is getting more dangerous, not less.

The town promised 1,500 senior homes and has barely started.

Clarkstown’s 2021 plan for the town’s future called for 1,500 senior homes.6 Five years later barely any have been built.

Developers were lining up for those sites the same year.9 Five years on, parents who raised families here still have nothing smaller to move into, and their children cannot afford to move back.

The town borrowed money for photocopiers.

Roughly $28 million of new borrowing across 50 separate decisions, including photocopiers, office software and a timeclock system, all repaid over years with interest that lands on your tax bill.

Town debt went from $112 million at the end of 2020 to about $156 million in December 2025.7 None of those 50 decisions went to a public vote. Every one of them is repaid out of property taxes, so those bills keep rising for years after the photocopier is gone.

The engineer who found a $594,469 billing gap was put on leave.

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 difference.8

The town put him on leave and filed an ethics complaint against him. It says the investigation predates his memos. His attorney says he was targeted for reporting waste.

Residents are still waiting for someone to explain where the money went.

Clarkstown tried to limit protests, then denied it.

The Four Corners in Nanuet is where Rockland has gone to protest for sixty years.

In November 2025 Supervisor George Hoehmann and Councilman Don Franchino suggested allowing protests there only on Sunday mornings, 8 to 10 a.m., or moving them to a college campus in another town.11 Hoehmann said businesses were complaining and police overtime cost too much.

His own police chief disagreed at that meeting. The protesters had been courteous. There were no incidents. Nobody blocked traffic.

Two weeks later 250 residents packed the board room. Hoehmann told them “There is no plan. There was never a plan."12

Residents then had to sit through 40 more votes before the board opened the floor. Many waited until 11 p.m. to be heard.

Clarkstown promised transparency, then took the tool down.

In 2016 the town launched a website where anyone could look up how it spends your money. It was called Accountable Clarkstown.13

“On day one I promised the people of Clarkstown a more transparent and responsive government,” Supervisor George Hoehmann said.

It is gone. The link is off the town website, and searching the site turns up nothing.

To put the debt figures on this page together, residents had to read ten years of board minutes by hand, one resolution at a time. That is the job the tool was supposed to do.