Above, the boardwalk atop the Rosendale railroad trestle, undated photo. Anyone who speaks of the recent tax foreclosure without discussing unlawful denial of several bungee jump business ventures, is only providing half-truths. Those who claim the Wallkill Valley Railroad Company no longer exists, is ignorantly (or maliciously) slandering title. The scam is similar to the Wreck of the Penn Central: raise taxes illegally until bankruptcy ensues, then grab the property for pennies and drop taxes back down to zero. Who benefits? The utility companies owing millions to the railroad in transmission line crossing contracts.
The following short blurb from today’s Times Herald-Record perfectly illustrates how mainstream media colludes with corrupt government, hand-in-hand, to combine a despicable concert of interests. The blurb will be quoted in its entirety, then deconstructed.
Purchase doubles length of rail trail in Ulster
NEW PALTZ — The Open Space Institute and Wallkill Valley Land Trust have extended the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail by 11.5 miles, roughly doubling its length.
On Monday, the groups announced the acquisition of approximately 65 acres of the former Wallkill Valley Railroad in Ulster County. The move will provide a nearly continuous recreational trail that runs through the towns of Gardiner, New Paltz, Rosendale and Ulster, and on to Kingston. Extended, the trail will run almost continuously for 23.7 miles.
The two groups got the railroad bed from the county, which acquired the lands through tax foreclosure in April. The trail includes the 940-foot-long railroad trestle over Rondout Creek in the hamlet of Rosendale.
Several facts important to this story have been entirely left out, as if they did not exist at all. This was done on purpose.
What TH-R — together with local government — are hiding from you, is that the property described above has already been a “rail trail” for the past 23 years, although privately owned.
The private lands of the Wallkill Valley Railroad Company during that time were, under law, supposed to be taxed at a lower rate called “railroad ceiling.” There’s a whole slew of obscure railroad law applicable to this property, which practically nobody understands. Explaining all the nuances takes a great deal of time.
Suffice to say here, for the sake of brevity, the Wallkill Valley Railroad was chartered in 1866 and provided continuous service — either as train or trail — for almost 150 years. Therefore the statutes which apply to it include the NY Railroad Law of 1872 — which gives the corporation much more power than a modern one.
Other unique aspects — including an 1899 perpetual lease — quite possibly grant half ownership of Conrail. A Conrail spokesman refused comment back in 1996. Records — on file with the county — grant WVRR enormous privileges, like the right to divert the Rondout Creek, plus taking forever all sand & gravel under Rosendale’s Tillson Estates subdivision.
Getting back to the 21st Century: Although there is no current train service, the land maintains railroad status grandfathered through the “transportation use,” as a public rail trail. Thus, WVRR enjoys a continuous public service dating straight back to its original 1866 charter. It’s a hard argument to surmount, having been upheld in principle by the landmark US Supreme Court ruling, Dartmouth vs. Woodward.
However, immediately after John Ethan Rahl purchased eleven miles of railroad in 1986, the county & state quadrupled the property tax — without offering a fair hearing. The tax hike — and stripping of railroad status — was done “sua sponte.”
You should keep all this in mind, because now that WVRR lands have finally been “foreclosed” — due to suffering 23 years of wrongful residential rates — the property will next be removed from the tax rolls — same exact parcels foreclosed this year for excessively levied taxes — same exact land use.
We all know it, corrupt government officials whimsically tax property at different rates depending on who owns it — and whether or not they “like” you. Usually they get away with it, apparently even when someone owns a railroad.
Yet like it or not, the RR Law of 1872 is quite clear: after a charter has been established, road constructed, service provided, the deal is sealed as “contract”: railroad property forever. That’s the law, in case you bother to read it (which, nowadays, nobody seems to do anymore).
No future law can undue that kind of “contract,” according to the US Constitution, Art I, Sec. 10.
No official, legislature, or judge, dead or alive, has the constitutional power to void a formal contract represented by a railroad charter. The WVRR corporation, as chartered in 1866, is a law unto itself: an act of the legislature, held privately as real estate.
Sounds weird, but that’s the way law was written back then, and those conditional surviving statutes have never been repealed. Extraordinary corporate power was required in order to build America’s transportation infrastructure.
That’s why, to this day, railroad property cannot be conveyed without first obtaining a release from the commissioner of NYS DOT. The rights-of-way condemned through eminent domain during the last century exist for public transportation use, and must be preserved against capricious waste. These protections exist in the Railroad Law, which takes precedence over all other sections coming into conflict with it.
Some observers took umbrage at Rahl’s “one dollar deal,” although in reality a five figure sum was exchanged in the 1986 conveyance. Nobody else wanted to take upon themselves the liability of owning an antique trestle — which Rahl leveraged to his own advantage. He knew that the corporate railroad rights “run with the land,” and made sure Conrail wrote their quitclaim deed according to his personal specifications.
Barely anyone understands that the term “abandoned” in Railroad Law only refers to service. The charter & franchise exist long after the tracks are torn up, dwelling in their place of creation (the NY Dept. of State). Rahl can back his claims up with a wall full of antique, leather-bound railroad law books — he’s read them all, and would be happy to expound for anyone willing to look. Alas, lawyers nowadays weren’t alive during the 19th century railroad boom, and never learned this stuff in law school. All they know today, laments Rahl, is “blah, blah, blah.”
One thing’s for sure, contemporary local government officials don’t “like” John Rahl. Ever since he purchased the property in 1986, various factions in the community have worked ceaselessly to slander his property title, and undermine his efforts to make a living.
Two local officials — county legislator Alan Lomita, and county attorney Bea Havranek — have been instrumental in denying John Rahl his rights.
Havranek (nee Capone) was Rosendale’s town supervisor back in 1991, when she organized community opposition to Rahl’s first bungee jumping venture. The idea was to use WVRR’s historic trestle over the Rondout Creek to generate millions of dollars in revenue (and sales taxes). Public documents hidden away in nearby Iron Mountain reveal Havranek’s personal role in quashing the bungee plan.
As industrially zoned real estate, the trestle ought to have been permitted less restrictive “commercial use” under town zoning. Unfortunately, a semantic argument successfully clouded legality, and the town falsely alleged that the trestle was residentially zoned. Therefore no “recreational use” would be tolerated.
The late judge Vincent Bradley ruled against the project in Rosendale vs. Rahl. [Bradley later reversed himself, in Rosendale vs. Century House Historical Society (1996, another Havranek-inspired kerfuffle), ruling “the zoning law was never shown to exist.”]
It should be noted here, that “recreational use” only applied to bungee jumping, something which would generate enough funds to allow Rahl to pay his land taxes. Other recreational uses, such as rail trail walking, jogging, biking, equestrianism — and, oddly enough, even rappelling — went on for twenty three years unabated — and with nary a peep of complaint from anybody.
Furthermore, the land beneath the trestle on the south side of the creek is a town park; and the land on the northern end is a private hunting ground (former recreational ski jump), the Joppenburgh Mountain Corporation. These facts make Rosendale’s “recreational use” case against bungee jumping simply ridiculous.
Added to the 1991 case against Rahl were further nonsense issues, including the assertion that car crashes would ensue when motorists mistook the jumping activity for “committing suicide.” Nuisance from screaming was arbitrarily assumed, without any sound testing, despite overwhelming ambient noise from wind, water, and traffic. Not to mention, nothing can be louder than a passing train, for which the trestle was originally built.
An expensive boardwalk walkway was constructed across the trestle to facilitate the initial bungee platform, financed by local millionaire Peter Hood, a partnership which eventually fell apart. Years later, in late 2003, a second investor was chased out of town by an angry mob of residents, while attempting to re-introduce bungee on the trestle. Once again, assertions against the business were based primarily upon a personal dislike for Rahl, and false claims about the property being “residential.”
Havranek’s son Joey, for example, stood up at the ZBA hearing and theorized that excited screams would be heard all the way to Kingston. He based such acoustic science on train whistles heard rolling southward along the creek from Esopus. A woman from the Catholic church stood up and solemnly declared that bungee jumping is against God, because the thrill was similar to suicide. The same church once hosted bungee concessions at their own festivals. Peter McCormick, the only adjacent property owner, humorously predicted that dead bodies would float past his back yard — but he lives upstream.
Finally, county legislator Alan Lomita stated he was Rahl’s neighbor and simply didn’t want a business so near to his own home. Lomita, a close political ally of Havranek, later served on the county legislature’s ways & means committee which decided to take Rahl’s foreclosed property off the public auction block, and hand it over to a private land trust — without holding a public hearing.
In this manner, the taxpayers inherited over one million dollars in trestle liability, all for paltry tax arrears of about fifteen thousand. Clearly Lomita should have recused himself from deliberations, along with Havranek as current county attorney. But who cares about public interest, when you’ve got a personal vendetta to settle?
Bungee wasn’t the only venue where Rahl got screwed out of his property rights. Much income during the rail trail era derived from “line crossing” agreements with local utility companies. These contracts carried over from the days of steel rails and cabooses. Signed, sealed & renegotiated in modern times, large corporations including Time Warner, Central Hudson, Verizon, and others, united together and stopped paying — throwing Rahl into bankruptcy.
Local and state prosecutors — among them former attorney general Dennis Vacco, plus Ulster County DAs Michael Kavanagh (now an appellate judge in Manhattan), and his successor Donald Williams (running for judge), refused to press criminal charges as required by Railroad Law. No choo-choo train, you see, so no railroad rights, they guessed. Don Williams also stated emphatically that he “doesn’t care.” A railroad is entitled to its own police department; older species such as WVRR even enjoy the privilege of suing in the name of the People of the State of NY.
But nobody wanted to listen, few in power are willing to admit John Rahl knows what he’s talking about. His ordinary neighbors in Rosendale, for the most part, believe the railroad claims — but alas, their collective apathy long ago decided that “‘they’ [the powers that be], won’t let Rahl have all that money.” And so, the “powers that be” have deprived Rahl his due, taken everything away, and now try to tell you that it never existed to begin with.
