Facing off with various counsel representing billionaire Neil Bender’s family business, William Gottlieb Real Estate, it’s been one battle after another for the city of Kingston, and top lawyer Barbara Graves-Poller is getting sick of it.
On March 11 of this year, she filed a motion to see sanctions brought against one of Bender’s lawyers, William Hurst of the Sommer and Young law firm, as well as Gottlieb Real Estate — a consequence she suggests be delivered for an alleged pattern of vexatious and frivolous conduct.
Her motion impugns Hurst’s and Gottlieb Real Estate’s motivations, alleging, among other behaviors, “resource-consumptive litigation — not honest dispute resolution — is plaintiffs’ goal … theft of taxpayer resources via ‘lawfare’ as well as maximizing litigation burdens and imposing unnecessary costs on Kingston’s taxpayers” … “commenced solely to punish a city refusing to bend to their deep-pocketed will.”
Giving an example, Graves alleged, “Plaintiffs claimed to own the canopies in one lawsuit, while suing the City as a negligent owner in another.”
Not to be outdone, Hurst filed his own motion a week later alleging frivolous litigation positions and lack of candor by Graves-Poller and calling for plaintiffs’ costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees to be awarded.
In just the past year and a half, Hurst filed seven lawsuits against the city (one with the aid of commercial litigator Benjamin Neidl), each time on behalf of seven properties Bender owns through his company in uptown Kingston.
Two of those lawsuits failed first in Ulster County’s Supreme Court and again on appeal, while another failed before a federal judge, but three others have yet to work their way through the courts. Disagreeing with the interpretation of a judge in one case who ruled only partially in the city’s favor, Graves-Poller has filed her own appeal.
The most recent lawsuit, filed over John Pike’s network of contiguous wooden canopies, now demolished over Bender’s protests, looks to force the city to surrender its easement, which affects the spandrel of the facade.
To hear City mayor Steve Noble explain it, the removal of the canopies was a cost-saving measure compared to what the total would have been had the city rebuilt and continued maintaining the architectural additions, troubled ever after an incompetent renovation played out early last decade.
The city went ahead and pulled the canopies down over the winter at an estimated cost of $1,056,000 to the taxpayer. So far the city has also paid out $1.27 million in settlements to 38 out of 46 building owners for facade damage caused by the removal of the canopies. Bender was not among them.
Just what the canopies meant to Bender can be gleaned in court papers, which allege that he experienced “personal humiliation, emotional distress and mental anguish and suffering” resulting from the city’s efforts to tear down the canopies.
Hurst also alleged in federal court that Bender feared “potential political violence” against his Gottleib employees after the mayor encouraged residents to send postcards to the company expressing their feelings and cast the intended demolition as “a mayoral vendetta concocted as retribution for his anti-Kingstonian lawsuits.”
Arrested development
The city of Kingston or affiliated agencies saw 11 lawsuits filed over three years in order to prevent the realization of a mixed-use, 143-apartment-unit and parking complex called the Kingstonian. The project that received the final go-ahead from the city all the way back in 2022, after a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) was approved at a value of over $26.2 million in 2021.
Herzog’s president, Kingston Plaza parking lot and strip mall owner Brad Jordan, a lead developer on the Kingstonian project, faced a process riddled with question marks.
One member of the IDA who voted for the tax break, Daniel Savonna, was a commercial tenant of Bender’s strip mall, while a member of the city council who voted on various measures supporting the project, like the giveaway of a city street (termed a partial abandonment), Steve Schabot, was an employee of Jordan’s. During crucial votes, neither individual recused himself, and the school board never approved the tax breaks.
The lone IDA board member to vote ‘no’ on the tax break, Diane Eynon, said the developers were asking for too much.
“A $17 million parking garage to construct for a $26 million inducement for maybe a net of 200 additional parking spaces: For those reasons, I don’t support the project,” she said before voting.
When the next school board election came up, supporters of the project, with the loud public endorsements of mayor Steve Noble and county legislator Dave Donaldson, attempted — and failed — to replace intransigent school board members with those who would support the Kingstonian’s school tax break.
(The school board candidates presumed to be supportive were Matthew Branford, David Donaldson’s son-in-law, and Michele Milgrim, Deputy County Executive John Milgrim’s wife. Both received the lion’s share of their qualifying signatures from members of the Bruderhoffer congregation, ostensibly voting as a block at the mayor’s request — the Bruderhoffers lease business space from the mayor at the Kingston business park.)
In the end, UCIDA members decided that they didn’t require the signoff of the school board after all by voting to amend their own charter to change language saying otherwise.
Memorably, chair of the school board James Shaughnessy felt so hard done by the whole affair that he joined a number of Bender’s lawsuits opposing the project.
Real (estate) talk
A transactional real estate lawyer not involved in either the Pike Plan or Kingstonian lawsuits, John Hoyt has worked from his office on Wall Street since 1978. No lover of the demolished canopy, which was fixed to the front of his building, none of this is news to him.
“To be fair to Mr. Bender, it wasn’t completely without justification that he got angry …,” Hoyt explained. “There were a lot of people who agree that those tax benefits were a little bit excessive. He could clearly see that the Kingstonian, in its efforts to develop its property, was being treated very differently than he was being treated. And that, I think, … helped to [inform] his approach to how he was going to deal with the city. The city has to own a little bit of that.”
Allowing for the billionaire’s feelings, Hoyt, who used to teach marketing as an adjunct professor at Marist college, still offers a critique of the path Bender has chosen.
“I was thinking of all the marketing principles out there,” Hoyt says, “trying to get their position across, trying to achieve something, how to do it, how not to do it … if the selling of your position is repulsive to the people you’re trying to sell your position to, that makes it difficult. Maybe in New York City, if you have a pizza shop and somebody comes in and looks at you sideways and you can throw them out and there’s 8 million more people, but it’s a different universe up here. People know each other and word gets around. The cost of the litigations and the publication of all these litigations [to the taxpayer] has resulted in a fairly strong resentment on the part of a lot of citizens of Kingston. And that is not smart marketing.”
Opinionated but fearful of “the litigious Mr. Bender,” a real estate agent asking to remain anonymous who happened to pass by Hoyt’s office and overheard the topic of discussion suggested it might just boil down to being born with billionaire-sized elbows.
“It’s truly amazing to me — here’s a guy who’s invested heavily, he’s bought up a number of buildings, many of them are landmark buildings, a lot of square footage, and nothing very much is happening with them,” the real estate agent alleged. “There’s a few buildings that are being occupied, but you would think that if you want to maximize your investments and want things to be lively, you would want and attempt to have a good relationship with the municipality and with the business community.”
Hoyt recalled an informal gathering of building owners and tenants orchestrated by Dave Amato on Feb. 17 at the conference room in the Best Western in uptown Kingston, “being exposed to William Hurst,” and seeing much left to be desired.
“He’s probably a wonderful, nice, knowledgeable gentleman, but at that meeting he was aggressive to the point of being rude,” Hoyt recalled.
As to the chances for Bender’s latest lawsuit, attempting to force Kingston to abandon its easement, Hoyt doesn’t give very good odds.
“The original easement, it was actually granted on one document that all the property owners signed. In simple terms, an easement by grant, a deed-type conveyance, is not eliminated or extinguished through abandonment. It would take an actual document extinguishing the easement. And they could do one document and just have a load of grantees, all the property owners as grantees, and get rid of the easement. I think at present the city is saying we’re not totally done.”
“I wish everybody well and I hope [Mr. Bender] does very well,” Hoyt offers. “But it’s interesting that sometimes a clumsy effort toward achieving a goal can be self-defeating.”
Hoyt, who likened the effect of doing business under the Pike Plan canopy to living in a cave all these years, can actually remember the buyer’s remorse evidenced by the original business owners at seeing the canopies go up.
“I knew all these people, Cliff and Bernice Bunting, Stanley and Audrey London, Elmore and Robert Yallum, and to a person, all of the merchants, retailers in the uptown Stockade area, they all said they were sold a bill of goods by Urban Renewal. It was a mistake from day one and it only got worse from there.”
Long-suffered by Hoyt, whatever may happen with the vestigial legal jockeying, the canopy is now gone forever. Only its ghost remains hanging in the air over Wall Street.
“I walk outside and there’s sunlight,” Hoyt says. “You start to realize the ominous effect of that canopy that you were not even aware of — like a downward dark compression. Now, you come outside and you start standing more erect. Not just looking down, you’re looking up.”
The real estate agent, a bit of a provocateur, says: “Have you seen the sticker on the stairs coming up from the car park? When you leave, go look at it and take a photo. Somebody’s got to take a photo.”
Near the top of the stairs giving out onto Wall Street, the sticker is a faux real-estate ad for Neil Bender. Its message is not kind.
Graves-Poller steps down as Democratic Committee chair as her party dominates local politics
Good news, Ulster. Residents in the county are among some of the most committed to voting in all of New York State. Out of the 183,330 Ulster County residents, as of February, 128,819 have registered to vote.
Taking into account Ulster County’s 30,249 residents prohibited from voting for being under the age of 18, along with the 9.7 percent of all county residents affected by cognitive disability, the gap between those allowed to vote and those unable to vote narrows even further.
Consider also the 5 percent of county residents older than 79 years of age, now entering the autumn of their lives and encountering higher instances of physical infirmity and cognitive issues than other age groups. Even then, countywide voter registration hovers above 85 percent.
Lovers of an engaged electorate have President Donald Trump to thank. Much like the visceral dislike Hillary Clinton generated among her own opponents in 2016, Trump has catalyzed his own opposition in droves.
A state law that takes effect for the first time this upcoming voting season moves local elections from odd years over to even years, a change which Republicans in the Ulster County legislature attempted to resist at the time with a memorializing resolution. Held on even-numbered years, presidential, gubernatorial and congressional elections all reliably produce higher voter turnout.
Going into the midterms, Democrats and Democrat-adjacent voters already have the upper hand, as they have in every election cycle over the last 10 years. This time around, they enjoy an approximate advantage of 22,000 actively registered voters as of February.
A minority in the county, but in power nationally, the tightrope walk the Ulster County Republican Committee has had to navigate has been to emphasize an ‘all politics is local politics’ message while simultaneously juggling alignment with Trump administration policies.
Power shuffle
But one development menacing an otherwise sunny outlook for Ulster County’s Democrats was the sudden departure of their committee chair, Barbara Graves-Poller.
Announced on March 13, the outgoing chair stated that the changing commitments of her professional life made it impossible to serve out the months remaining in her term. Graves-Poller was sworn in as committee chair in September of 2024. She has served as Kingston’s corporation counsel since 2021.
Ulster County Democratic Committee vice chair Jeff Collins, a county legislator for Hurley and Woodstock, has assumed the post until September, when committee members huddle at their convention and officially vote to select a new chair.
Looking to reassure the party faithful, Collins points to the succession plan in the bylaws. “It’s a very important year for us to do as much as we can do and do as well as we can do,” Collins said. “and we’re continuing doing exactly the same work we were doing before.”
Having captured power at the county level, where Democrats sit in all relevant executive and legislative catbird seats, Collins believes the role of the Democratic committee locally is to mirror the platform and planks of his party nationally, where it currently governs as a minority. This is not, he says, because committee members don’t have their own opinions or that the county doesn’t have issues which can be addressed more granularly. It’s that spelling out planks for the party locally — such as staking out a position on whether to accept campaign funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or whether to support Democratic assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha’s enthusiasm for publicly-owned utilities — risks fracturing the party.
“That’s more divisive than it is uniting us. So we want to look at things that we unite behind as Democrats,” Collins said. “One of my analogies is that Democrats are like cats — we don’t always agree but we’re very similar. We don’t believe necessarily in uniformity. We believe in democracy.”
Collins, then, places a premium on party cohesion ahead of what Graves Poller referred to as a pivotal election year.
“With the Congressional [races] and the State Senate and the Assembly, we’re obviously going to put a lot of effort into them and make sure we win. What we’re also looking at is expanding even our county legislative lead majority.”
Democrats enjoy a commanding lead in the state legislature, 100 to 50 in the State Assembly and 41-22 in the State Senate, while in the Ulster County Legislature, Republicans are in danger of facing near extinction, 19-4.
“We’re expecting to run 22 candidates,” Collins said. “And we’re going to work to get as many of them elected as possible.”
(In the U.S. congress, Democrats trail 213 to 218 seats in the House of Representatives and 53 to 47 seats in the Senate.)
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