Mt. Pleasant Hires National Law Firm to Fight Allegations by Sleepy Hollow Hispanics that the Town is Violating the Voting Rights Act
By Barrett Seaman—
In the first few months after receiving a letter from a law firm representing five Hispanic-American residents of the Village of Sleepy Hollow, alleging that the town’s “at-large” voting system systematically discriminated against Hispanics, the Town Board of Mt. Pleasant, which includes Sleepy Hollow, initially responded by the book.
They stated that they would review the process within the 90 days allotted by the New York State’s year-old John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act; they would hire outside experts to conduct their own evaluations, and that after receipt of those evaluations, they would hold two public hearings, after which they would consider remedies (for background, see: https://thehudsonindependent.com/mt-pleasant-grapples-with-sleepy-hollow-voting-rights-charge/).
After the two hearings, however, both of which were marked by angry public opposition, the Town Board fell silent on the matter, allowing a Thanksgiving deadline for a response to pass. This past week, lawyers from the firm of Abrams Fensterman representing the Sleepy Hollow Hispanic voters, finally pulled the trigger, filing a lawsuit before the Westchester Supreme Court, detailing in a 33-page complaint how the Mt. Pleasant had effectively “demoted” the Town’s Hispanic community “to second class citizens.”
At the Mt. Pleasant Town Board meeting the same night, Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi asked for and received Board approval to hire Baker Hostetler, a national law firm with a thousand lawyers in 17 offices and expertise in the voting rights arena, to represent the Town in the case. “We had interviewed this firm about a month and a half, two months ago,” he allowed, “and were very satisfied with the background and knowledge of this firm.”
The Abrams Fensterman complaint had observed that the Supervisor and all four of the Board members were White and Republican and that there had been “no candidate of color for the Town Board since 2003.” Further evidence of the imbalance cited included the Board’s opposition to affordable housing initiatives “overwhelmingly popular among Hispanics but disfavored by the White majority,” and its declaration of an emergency to prevent asylum seekers from residing in the Town, again in contrast to Hispanic support.
Somewhat ironically, the complaint’s allegations were largely consistent with the observations of the Town’s two hired experts, Jeffrey Wice and Dr. Lisa Handley. The Wice report confirmed the relevance of the law to Sleepy Hollow and outlined the steps needed to address the inequity. Dr. Handley’s statistical analysis concluded that “Hispanic voters and Non-Hispanic White voters consistently support different candidates and the candidates supported by non-Hispanic White voters usually prevail in Mount Pleasant elections.”
“All six of the recent Mount Pleasant elections I analyzed were racially/ethnically polarized,” Dr. Hanley concluded, “with Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters consistently supporting different candidates. Of the candidates preferred by Hispanic voters only one prevailed in the six polarized contests.”
Those defending the status quo during the hearings claimed that the fault was not in the voting system but in the low turnout of Hispanic voters. Any remedy, such as switching to a ward system where individual communities like Sleepy Hollow would elect their own representatives, they argued, would weaken the majority’s voting power.
Not everyone who spoke at the hearings advocated fighting the Sleepy Hollow case. Jonathan Blackman, an attorney from Pleasantville who has argued Voting Rights cases in other jurisdictions, warned that most cases brought under the federal statute were decided in favor of the plaintiffs. He urged the Board to seek a compromise with the litigants and save itself a lot of legal expenses.
As a top tier law firm, Baker Hostetler will doubtless be charging Mt. Pleasant hefty legal fees. At the November 28 public hearing, Supervisor Fulgenzi assured a questioner during the public hearing that the Town had a “fund balance” reserve of between $14 and $17 million, plus insurance, that could be tapped to limit taxpayer exposure. Fulgenzi has also reportedly suggested that, rather than just contest that the Town is in violation of the letter of the Voting Rights law, their new lawyers will attack the constitutionality of the law itself—a strategy that would most likely take the case through the entire New York court system on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Win or lose, the Town will have to pay its lawyers, but according to the law, if they lose, they will also be obliged to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Several years ago, the East Ramapo (NY) School District spent some $7 million defending a similar case but lost, exposing them to an additional $4.3 million to reimburse the plaintiff, the NAACP.
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