Town Board Meeting: Where Questions Go to Die and Smells Persist!

Dorey Houle and Tony Cardone are failing to address critical water district issues, leaving residents to bear the burden of rising taxes and deteriorating infrastructure.

We’re back. I hope you enjoyed your Labor Day weekend. It’s worth remembering the role of labor and our unions in bettering our lives, given that we’re currently living through a Second Gilded Age.

This situation became possible due to anti-union and anti-labor policies and positions taken by both Democrats and Republicans since the days Ronald Reagan roamed the White House. You can draw a straight line connecting Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and their anti-labor policies that have put us in the position we’re all in right now.

Speaking of which, this Saturday, September 6, Hands Off Hudson Valley is holding another event at the corner of Lake Street and 17M at 1 p.m. If you’re upset about what’s going on with the Trump administration or Robert F. Kennedy putting all of our lives in danger through his actions at HHS, you should be there.

You might be wondering what that position is — it’s autocracy — which brings us back to the Town of Monroe and the issues involving some of the local water districts.

The Suburbs Are Falling Apart

You see, from FDR to Carter, there was a federal government that—while imperfect—invested in local community infrastructure.

So if you had a water district where the pipes were breaking, for example, you could count on the federal government to come in and fund what was needed to get it fixed. But then you had Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama, and all of that went away for varying reasons. Reagan and Bush wanted to, to paraphrase one famous conservative weirdo, shrink the federal government down to a size that would allow him to drown it in a bathtub. Clinton continued Reagan and Bush’s policies because they were popular, as people are often bad at conceptualizing the long-term consequences of their actions, let alone those of the federal government.

Then Bush Jr. came in and continued those poisonous policies, leading to a massive recession that defined most of Obama’s presidency, although he certainly made plenty of bad decisions too, such as not holding the banks accountable for that recession.

Then you had Trump take a wrecking ball to what was left, and then Biden trying to fix it, but it was too late. Because — after forty years of anti-working class, anti-union, anti-labor nonsense, people weren’t buying the solutions Biden was selling — even though they were working.

This is largely because the Biden White House wasn’t very good at communicating with the public, nor were they honest about Biden’s health and mental state. This problem still exists today with the Democrats, where you have “AIPAC Shakur” (Hakeem Jeffries) talking a big game against Trump while doing very little, and Chuck Schumer somehow doing even less. Cory Booker and our local Congressman Pat Ryan say all the right things but then vote on policies that further enable Trump—like the GENIUS Act. Then you’ve got Pete Buttigieg regurgitating corporate Democrat talking points, and “influencers” like David Pakman taking money from corporations to say all the right things about Trump but not offering any solutions on how to fix the problems that gave us Trump in the first place.

That brings us to the fascist moment we’re living in, where you have a president who isn’t honest about anything and whose administration is actively a threat to you, your family, and your community.

So now, you get local municipalities like the Town of Monroe, run by incompetent liars in the form of Tony Cardone, Sal Scancarello, and Dorey Houle, complaining about “unfunded mandates” while repeatedly demonstrating a factual inability to follow directions and secure the little state funding that’s left to fix issues like the water district problems.

If there was a Town of Monroe Drinking Game, everyone should take a shot whenever Tony Cardone complains about “unfunded mandates.”

And then, of course, Houle, Scancarello, and Cardone lie to the public about how hard they’re trying to solve these problems—they’re not trying very hard at all—and instead raise your taxes if you live in those water districts. Or they do things like loudly tell the public that they’re working on an Intermunicipal Agreement with the Village of Monroe Police Department while actually doing nothing in reality, instead wasting your money on a non-emergency contact hotline, which we’ll get to in an upcoming post.

(I had to put in a FOIL request after Cardone claimed they’ve recieved, and acted on, nine different calls to this hotline. Since Cardone routinely lies to the public, it’s worth asking and seeing if those nine calls are even real.)

When watching the September 2, 2025, Town of Monroe Board meeting, I laughed out loud as Dorey Houle said, “We will always tell you the truth,” which was followed less than two minutes later by Tony Cardone stating that everyone on the Town Board opposed the development of the Rye Hill property.

Nope.

That’s not even close to being true.

Houle and Cardone both actively supported developing the Rye Hill property. But they’re counting on you being too stupid to go back and look at Town Board video and meeting minutes from 2022 and 2023. They’re also counting on Jean Straus at The Photo-News to ensure there’s absolutely no fact-checking of anything Cardone and Houle say, as The Photo-News tends to just repeat what they say at meetings verbatim.

Last week, I attended a Woodbury Public Library Board meeting where I asked Woodbury Public Library Board President Cathy Schmidt to apologize to Mrs. Maria Hunter and Mrs. Patricia Spear.

Mrs. Schmidt declined to apologize. The Woodbury Public Library has until their next meeting to get back to me as to whether or not they’re going to investigate the matter.

For those who don’t remember: Mrs. Cathy Schmidt nearly assaulted Mrs. Hunter on or around October 8, 2024, at a Town Board workshop involving the library budget. This is something confirmed by three witnesses, and two Town Board members — although both Town Board members, Capriglione and Luongo — are now trying to downplay what happened. Instead of Mrs. Schmidt being physically restrained from Mrs. Hunter, Luongo and Caprilgione are both claiming it was a “loud disagreement.”

Prior to the incident with Maria Hunter, Mrs. Schmidt verbally assaulted Mrs. Patricia Spear, who was eight months pregnant at the time, in a July 2023 incident.

Mrs. Schmidt, despite her own witnesses confirming there was an incident, has for two years denied, in her official capacity as a representative of the library, that these incidents ever occurred. While attempting to cover for Mrs. Schmidt at the WPL Board meeting, Councilwoman Gretchen Weiners (Terea Luongo) said, “Why would I lie?”

Because She Can Get Away With It. So Can Dorey Houle

The answer is simple. It’s the same reason Dorey Houle can sit there and tell people she’s the single source of truth for the Monroe Town Board, despite years of evidence to the contrary.

Exhibit A is how Houle failed to keep the public notified of potential fires along the Monroe-Tuxedo border during last year’s Jennings Creek Fire. (But she did tell her friends on Facebook!)

Exhibit B is Houle’s failure to inform the Village of Monroe, in her role as Village Liaison, of threats to Mombasha Lake from nearby oil spills she was made aware of.

Exhibit C is the fact that Dorey Houle, Tony Cardone, and Orange County Legislator Peter Tuohy have known about the hydrogen sulfide issues on the children’s playground since 2021 and have done nothing about it. (Tuohy was at this meeting to claim that reports are being sent on levels to Cardone, but since Tuohy also compulsively lies, we’ve had to FOIL that one too just to confirm.)

Houle and Cardone also recently attended August’s OCSD1 Advisory Committee (above) and said nothing while Tuohy again downplayed the hydrogen sulfide smell. Nor did Houle and Cardone ask at that meeting, or at last night’s Town Board meeting, how South Blooming Grove keeps “running out of chemicals” to treat their sewage.

Cardone and Houle also did not ask what County Executive Steve Neuhaus or Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler is doing concerning South Blooming Grove’s de facto co-mayors, Joel Stern and Yitzchok “Isaac” Ekstein, about the proposed quid pro quo. Multiple witnesses, and at least one recording, confirm that Stern and Ekstein will only purchase and install the ANUE Water Technologies hardware, which should resolve the hydrogen sulfide issue, only if Orange County agrees to drop its lawsuit against South Blooming Grove and let them build a road through county-owned Gonzaga Park.

(Neuhaus claims there is no Quid Pro Quo. The District Attorney’s office has claimed investigations remain ongoing in South Blooming Grove, but they’ve also been saying that since 2021 …)

“Why would I lie?” asked Gretchen Weiners

Because there’s no one else publicly fact-checking anything anyone says at these meetings. You have The Photo-News repeating things verbatim, unless they’re inconvenient for Tony Cardone and Kathryn Luciani, and you’ve got The Monroe Gazette.

That’s why.

Both Dorey Houle and Teresa Luongo know they can get away with it. It’s the same reason Luciani can reply to a FOIL request, despite clear video evidence to the contrary, saying she does not send text messages during Woodbury Town Board meetings.

Who’s going to say otherwise?

So Let’s Recap

Do you see how all of these things are connected? I feel like most of you do. But if not, let me simplify it:

- The federal government subsidized the construction of the suburbs for the Baby Boomer generation.

- After Ronald Reagan came to power, both he and the Republican and Democratic parties abandoned the working class and started to slash all that funding. That meant states and local communities like Monroe were left holding the bag for major financial repairs or things like new sewer district wastewater treatment plants and water districts.

- There are fewer and fewer state dollars available because now you have a federal government that is completely dysfunctional, meaning the states have to make up the cost for just about everything. And, spoiler alert, as the suburbs reach the same age as the oldest Baby Boomers, the infrastructure is starting to fail, and it needs a lot of money to fix—the kind only the federal government can provide.

- In Monroe, like in Woodbury, as corrupt as the local Democratic Party is, most of the Republicans are incompetent liars who want to do as little as possible while taking as much of your tax dollars for themselves as they can. So what you get instead of solutions are higher taxes because they don’t care about you, and they never did. If Cardone cared about this situation, he would have filed the appropriate paperwork, on time, with the Assemby and Senate in order to apply for funding to fix it. But he hasn’t, and he won’t, because it’s easier to lie about it and complain about “unfunded mandates.”

One last thing, and like I said, we’ll get to that Monroe hotline and Walmart parking lot cleanup story real soon…

Tony Cardone, Dorey Houle, and Sal Scancarello have mostly rubber-stamped short-term rentals that have come before them. One of the very few exceptions was the one less than a mile from Tony Cardone’s home.

At the next September meeting, September 15, 2025, at 7 p.m., there will be a public hearing for yet another short-term rental.

This one is from a man who claimed financial hardship, despite owning two homes, and is using that hardship to justify converting 10 Twin Lakes Road into a rental.

If you’re upset about paying higher taxes, whether it’s for water district repairs, or for Orange County Sewer District 1’s new wastewater treatment plant, or because Houle and Cardone would rather waste your money on non-emergency hotlines instead of negotiating to have the Village Police patrol the Town roads, you should oppose this short-term rental.

In fact, you should oppose every single short-term rental. Because each one that gets approved means one less tax-paying resident or family living in that home. That’s one less family in the Monroe-Woodbury School District. One less family visiting small businesses. One less family getting involved in their local community and going to meetings like this one.

Short-term rentals hollow out communities. They don’t build them.

And you, as a taxpayer, wind up subsidizing the cost of all the infrastructure repairs to fund these businesses—because that’s what they are—while seeing none of the benefits.

Meanwhile, New York State’s housing shortage gets no closer to being resolved, which means continued development.

This is something people in this community have loudly and clearly said they do not want.

So, if you don’t like the development, one thing you can do is speak out about the short term rentals whenever they come up on the agenda.