10/31/2021
Last week, now-former Village of Ballston Spa Mayor Larry Woolbright resigned, blaming, in large part, Trustee Liz Kormos for the conditions that led to his resignation. As we reported 2 1/2 years ago, this isn’t the first time public servants or committee members who have worked with Kormos have felt the need to resign their posts. Here is the original story from March 2019…
EXCLUSIVE: THIS AIN’T LIZ KORMOS’S FIRST RODEO (AND THAT SHOULD SCARE YOU)
The Untold Story of New Scotland During and After Kormos’s Controversial Days
By BSpa Truth Squad, Saturday, March 16, 2019
BALLSTON SPA, NY — Much has been suggested in the past weeks about a potential ethical violation by Ballston Spa Trustee Candidate Liz Kormos during her time involved in politics in New Scotland, New York — a small town in Albany County. On Monday, Republican real estate attorney Roz Robinson and Democratic land surveyor Cindi Elliott, former members with Kormos on the New Scotland Citizens Zoning Advisory Committee (“CZAC”), attended the Ballston Spa Village Board meeting. After that meeting, the two pro-Kormos pages (“A Better BSpa” and “Ballston Spa Friends for Change”) went into a defensive posture, with Kormos receiving an “endorsement” from New Scotland friend and current-Supervisor Doug LaGrange, defending her conduct from a “conflict of interest” inquiry from 2008 during Kormos’s time on the CZAC.
However, the question of the conflict of interest in New Scotland is just one piece of a multi-faceted story — a story of political intimidation, political agendas, guerilla political tactics, power grabs, and ultimately, a township struggling to grow as a result. That story has begun to repeat itself in the Ballston Spa, Ballston, and Milton areas with the same central figure — Kormos. Robinson and Elliott told the BSpa Truth Squad the entire story about New Scotland on Monday. While this article only highlights some quotes from that interview, we are making the entire interview available in a separate note here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bspa-truth-squad/a-conversation-with-former-new-scotland-czac-members-roz-robinson-cindi-elliott/542595179565735?sfns=mo
THE CZAC, AND ITS DEMISE
In 2008, as a result of a project proposal by Sphere Development on the Bender Melon Farm in New Scotland — which is located near the intersection of Routes 85 and 85A, a six-month moratorium was put in place to allow zoning to catch up to the Town’s 14-year-old Master Plan, and the CZAC was formed by the Town Board of New Scotland to assist with the process, with each member choosing a CZAC member. Kormos was chosen by current-Supervisor (but then-Councilman) Doug LaGrange. Robinson stated that the commercial district in New Scotland, which laid mostly dormant in recent history, is a small part of the entirety of the Town, saying, “[Three percent] of our town, 3%, is a commercial district. Tiny little commercial district. The owners of the Bender Melon Farm have the biggest parcel in there. And this developer came and was interested in doing a development there. A store, like an anchor store and some development and parks, a whole bunch of stuff.”
However, the proposal caused concern when the developer stated that a store like a Target was a possibility. Articles from “The Altamont Enterprise” highlighted Target as being the anchor, but Robinson and Elliott stated that this was not the reality of the situation. “[I]n order to get any development there, you're going to need at least an anchor to pay for the infrastructure. So we were talking about it, in our minds, a grocery store, a furniture store, something as an anchor to bring in all the mom and pop shops, that they want, which we all would want, for a restaurant and a button shop, as Cindi says. But you needed the anchor. But they convinced everybody that Sphere was going to bring in a Target.... Had it been mentioned? Yes. Was that ever what was going to happen? No, no Target was going to come. But [opponents] convinced [residents otherwise].” One of those opponents was Kormos, who was part of a “smart growth” organization called NS4 — New Scotlanders for Sound Economic Development. Kormos has touted herself in New Scotland and the Town of Ballston as an opponent of “big-box stores,” and the defeat of a Target in New Scotland was part of what people have suggested she has touted in the past.
Kormos joined the CZAC, and the committee eventually held a listening session at the local high school gymnasium, but the listening session was bombarded by opponents right at the start. “We walk in the high school, and in the lobby this other group, Liz's group, had a Powerpoint all about the negative and what would happen and people were going to get asthma and the traffic and you wouldn't be able to see the stars because of the lighting, yadda, yadda,” according to Robinson. Yet, the meeting became even more problematic, when at the end, some owners of the Bender Melon Farm approached the committee to introduce themselves after the meeting, with one gentleman saying about Liz, “I know this young lady,” Elliott remembered. Robinson added, “He said, ‘She brought a project in front of us, a group that was going to buy our property for mixed-use development.’” The documentation related to that 2006 discussion is included in the comments to this article, and highlights a “unique approval strategy” Kormos touted, as she underscored relationships with the New Scotland power structure for approval.
After walking away from this discussion, Robinson was alarmed that Kormos never raised this as a potential conflict since a defeat of the Sphere Development project could have opened the door to force the hands of the then-owners of the Bender Melon Farm to accept a lower-density, lower-purchase-price proposal like that which Kormos proposed not long before. Robinson sought advice about whether or not she could go into an executive session regarding this question to prevent it from looking like the CZAC was publicly bombarding Kormos, and a representative from Freedom of Information suggested it was the right thing to do. When Robinson called for the executive session, the board members thought it was to discuss Elliott’s membership on the Planning Board as being a conflict — but such a membership was desired by the Board. The issue was Kormos.
Robinson recalled the events, saying, “So we got into executive session and I told [Kormos], I said, ‘Look, I have a problem with this. Clearly the owner of the biggest parcel,’ blah, blah, blah. I go through the whole thing. She and [CZAC member] Mike Naughton were ballistic: ‘How can you do this? How could you catch her off-guard like this?’ I said, ‘I'm trying to do the right thing. I did this in private to give her an opportunity to explain as opposed to coming out at our public meeting and calling her out on it.’ So they had a fit, they said I was manipulative, etc. But I said, ‘Well, then, let's leave it here and let's see what we can ... Give me more details.’ And she walks out and she goes, ‘Fine, we're going to leave it here.’ We walk out into the public meeting, and she starts screaming and yelling at the press and everybody, ‘Roz trapped me.’”
Kormos hired a lawyer to help defend her from any claims of a conflict of interest. While LaGrange stated in his recent endorsement letter that Kormos could not have had a conflict of interest since a financial interest is not sufficient to create such a conflict for a member of an advisory committee (since they do not ultimately make the decisions), State and federal law seem at odds about whether or not this is true. For instance, the FDA states that it would be a conflict if an advisory committee member holds a financial interest in a matter in front of such a committee. Either way, the situation turned chaotic quickly after Kormos threatened to sue. “The ethics committee decided, for whatever reason, there wasn't an ethics violation. It was hearings and everything, it got ugly, there was screaming and yelling. So Cindi and I and John Biscone, three of the five on the CZAC, resigned,” Robinson remembered. The ethics panel was relatively new, leading to further dissatisfaction from Robinson and Elliott. Naughton and Kormos remained on the CZAC, making it a committee of just two people.
THE POLITICAL FALLOUT
Robinson, Elliott, and Biscone attempted to draft their own zoning changes and presented them to the Town Board as an alternative to the Kormos/Naughton plan, which included a 50,000-square-foot size cap. The NS4-supported cap was a problem, though, as a letter from the Bender Melon Farm’s owners’ counsel, Maura Mottolese stated, “Interestingly, Elizabeth Kormos, in her letters to the owners of the former Bender Melon Farm, acknowledges that the infrastructure improvements alone will cost over five million dollars to complete in order to make her proposed project viable.” (Letter included below.) This meant that a size cap that would eliminate even a major grocery store as an anchor and would likely eliminate a sufficient level of cash flow to assist any developer in extending the necessary utilities to the property (one of the last major commercial parcels in New Scotland).
Elliott explains why the size cap and the shenanigans surrounding the proposal were costly to the Town, stating, “But realistically, to understand this property ... We sit in the heart of Albany County. We have 37,000 acres. We are the largest town in Albany County. Geographically. We have a small population of about 8,900. It has stayed flat and it's projected to stay flat until the year 2050. We have no business [and no water]. We have 600 acres in this commercial zone. 600 acres out of 37,000. Okay. Are you seeing where you need ... This is the only spot we have. Realistically, it's also at the corner of [Routes] 85 and 85A [the main intersection in Town].” Without infrastructure, there was no ability to develop the parcel. Without some sort of anchor to draw commercial interest, there would be no infrastructure. And Kormos and NS4 knew this.
NS4 went on an intimidation tach to discredit especially Robinson and to obscure from the development issues really facing the Town. Robinson said, “And just so you'll know how it went, maybe three of four months later, lot of screaming, lot of ugliness, lot of misinformation ... They sent a letter all through town about me, ‘Who has Roz made promises to, whose made promises to Roz?’ … So I think, this all happened in the fall. After, in the winter, the vote was coming up for the new law. And they go down to the Town Board and we had three members of the Town Board really that felt the way we did, that this was a travesty, and two that didn't. So they go down to the Town Board and the Town Supervisor and one of the board members vote yes for this new law with the size cap.”
The vote: 2 yeas, 3 nays. The plan supported by Kormos and NS4 failed. Or did it? Elliott said the crowd during a screaming session intimidated the fifth voter and yelled, “Put it up again!” Robinson saw the fifth voter break down in front of her, recounting, “She starts to cry. The woman at the end. The third no, started to cry and they were screaming at her, knowing she was the emotional one. And the weakest. And so the Supervisor says, ‘Let's vote again.’” While a clear violation of Robert’s Rules of Order, the re-vote was taken: 3 yeas, 2 nays. The plan supported by Kormos and NS4 won, despite the improperness of the second vote.
Robinson tried to run for the Town Board as a result, but she said, “They spread misinformation, all sorts of things, and they won ... They really won, and the next election I ran and we got crushed, on fear.” The Town Board which was split during this time eventually swung to all Democrat-supported candidates, but with an interesting twist, according to Robinson. “So the board is now five members. They're smart just like Liz is doing now, they're not all Democrats. But none of them are Republicans. They're enrolled blank, Independent, or ... So they can say they have no political affiliation, but they all ran, all five of them, on the Democrat line. So right now, for 90% of the time, it's 5-0. It's 5-0, 5-0, not always but 95% of the time. Once in a while, just for show, they'll vote [against one another].”
A POWER VACUUM LEADS TO AN ECONOMIC VACUUM
The candidates NS4 and Liz helped propel in this manner weren’t content to just win control of the Town Board; they had broader plans.
First, Elliott was pushed off the Planning Board. “[F]irst they put in an ethics law,” Elliott explained, despite the original law stating she had no conflict since, “[I]t allowed me to work, be on the Planning Board, and not be in a conflict, because in our town minor subdivision and other house lots, does not come to the Planning Board.” Robinson added, “The new ethics law said if you had ANY business in front of the town, you couldn't be on the [Planning Board].” (Emphasis added.) Elliott wanted to fight the law, but the cost of doing so deterred her.
The Chairman of the Planning Board was forced to retire from his job just to continue to be on the Planning Board. However, they next went after him, according to Robinson: “[T]hen they passed a term limit. A term limit, because a lot of the people that were on these boards did not like what they were doing, so they passed a term limit, so everybody that were on these boards now, were gonna get term limited out. And they did.” The ploy worked, as Robinson explained, “What happened is one of their guys that was a spearhead with them, he became the Planning Board Chairman. So now the Planning Board is all handpicked by the five Democrat-endorsed Town Board members. After a few years, … the Planning Board Chairman's term was coming up, [and] they changed the law so that now the term limit didn't apply to him.”
During this time of political gamesmanship, New Scotland has stagnated, with the biggest effects being felt in the lack of services and the level of school taxes. Robinson said, “They put such restrictive laws, that when you restrict big business, you're also restricting little business, because the little business can't come in the Bender Melon Farm area — in that whole commercial district, there has been no development….. What's new in New Scotland? McMansions. We now have surrounding the commercial district, and these people are looking for services, homes that sell for you know, six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars. Our kids can't afford it. I can't afford it. My family that is retiring, they want to sell their big homes, there's no place to go. They opposed everything, and they wanted this mixed-use walkable community. You know, it is snowy February, March now. So in our commercial district, nothing has come in,” except for a Stewart’s that even met a tough approval process.
What’s worse is that the Town ignored landowner rights considerations in their new 289-page commercial zone overlay, according to Elliott. “They show trails coming down off of this area through private property that is already subdivided, that people own. Some of them are my clients. I called them up, and I said, ‘Did you notice that there's a trail going through your land?’”
The area’s already large school taxes have another problem: the need for a new high school will be almost fully borne by residents, according to Robinson. “Property taxes have gone up a little, not astronomically, because nothing's going on [with a lack of services]. The school taxes continue to go up to whatever the cap is, but you know, the concern now is that with all these new [McMansion] developments, they're all new coming in with new McMansions, although a lot of them only have one or two kids, that the school may need to expand. But for a long time, I gotta be honest, the school budgets went up, but nothing, because there's been no development.”
The Bender Melon Farm still remains dormant to this day, with the Town still creating new plans that have further risked any possible development down the line. According to “The Altamont Enterprise,” Supervisor LaGrange came under scrutiny recently for failing to ensure the Bender Melon Farm’s owners were represented at meetings concerning the Hamlet Plan that most affected that land. Readers may remember that LaGrange was one of the people that supported Liz in the beginning, and who NS4 and Liz supported in his ascent to Supervisor. LaGrange has been contacted by an Editor of BSpa Truth Squad to turn over any communications between him and Kormos since 2006 to ascertain the relationship between the two, but LaGrange has failed to respond. (A FOIL request may be forthcoming.)
CONCLUSION
The New Scotland story had one central character during most of the above: Liz Kormos. Robinson said Kormos’s fingerprints were all over the events that followed the CZAC debacle. “[I]t was very clear to us anyway that this particular group of people, that particular law firm [Young/Sommer], Liz and other chairmen of that NS4 group, they all had regular meetings together. And this was all decided together. I mean, could I prove that? I wasn't in those meetings, but they met all the time, they were on the Democrat committee, she would go to those meetings, so ... And she would come to all the public meetings and talk in favor of this. So she did speak in favor of all that. Can I tell you that she drafted it? No. Can I tell you she was at all these meetings? I believe they were.”
Elliott goes a step further in pointing the finger at Liz. “[S]he's played the game, and she stirs, and she'll tell you all of that, because she's very narcissistic. You just watched it [after the Village Board meeting in BSpa], to come up and talk [with Roz].”
Robinson suggested that Kormos played the victim frequently in New Scotland to win emotion points at crucial times. “Yeah, and the response would be, ‘What does that have to do with the subject at hand?’ And then she would just do kind of the crybaby thing, like the ‘woe is me.’ And again, that was the point I was making earlier, that they won on emotion.”
Robinson and Elliott, though, became concerned when they heard about Kormos’s candidacy in Ballston Spa. Robinson said she doesn’t have a personal ax to grind with Kormos despite becoming emotional as she explained what Kormos and NS4 have done to her home area. She added, “[W]hen I heard about all this, I thought to myself, ‘I can't let another town in my area go through what we went through in good conscience,’ and I thought if I don't speak up, then I'm as much to blame as anybody else, because I'm allowing Ballston Spa to have this happen to them just the way it happened to us. And I felt a duty. I have no ax to grind with her anymore. I have no skin in this game, but I felt like if I didn't say anything, shame on me. Shame on me. But I talked to my husband about it, and I almost didn't come, and I thought, ‘I can't. I gotta go.’ So that's why [I came]…. Our town is stagnant now, and I blame them.”
Elliott agreed with Robinson, saying, “[R]ealistically, evil exists because good people stand back and do nothing, okay? Do I have an ax to grind? No. Do I like Liz Kormos? No. But on the flip side, you've got two professional people here that have a lot of other things going on in their lives. Why are we here? We don't want you to go through what we did.”
When asked what her message is to Ballston Spa, Robinson said, “My message would be, think long and hard about your future, and if you don’t want a stagnant community with no growth, and people that wanna control everything, you cannot vote for Liz and her partner. To me, they killed my town that I grew up in, and it's sitting there, and it is because of them, because of her group…. [I]t's like deja vu. It's gonna repeat itself. I have no tie to Ballston Spa. I just believe in the right thing, and I think it will harm your community in the long run. It might take a long time. It's been a decade since this all happened to us, and we've got nothing, and people are finally now in the town of New Scotland thinking, ‘What the heck did we do?’ For the first time ever in the last couple of years, I have clients coming up to me that wanna do something in town that say, ‘I can't believe this board. I can't sneeze without a regulation,’ and that was all precipitated by the beginning of Liz Kormos’s group.”
Kormos has deleted many Facebook questions related to her New Scotland past, and several Facebook members that have posed the questions have been banned from the pro-Kormos pages. She dedicated about 20 seconds toward discussing the ethics questions she faced there during the debate Wednesday. Kormos has stated no desire to respond to questions from BSpa Truth Squad in the past. Regardless of her potential desire to avoid the topics raised here, the parallels between Kormos’s New Scotland story and her Ballston Spa story so far are incredible, from her involvement in the creation of Smart Growth Ballston (an NS4-like group), to her attempts to stack the Village Board (with her push for Noah Shaw and Shawn Raymond to win in the last election with a sudden unprecedented social media and propaganda war, and now her push for her own win with Christine Fitzpatrick, using a “nonpartisan” party line fully backed by the Democratic party), to her involvement on an advisory committee in an effort to potentially further her own agenda (most recently, the Village’s Budget Advisory Committee). Several other parallels are pointed out above. The story of Liz Kormos over the last decade shows an interesting pattern that voters have a right to know before heading to the polls Tuesday. If Kormos sends us a response to this story, we will post it in the comments below.
