Side of the Pond

 

New York City

March 29, 2011

To the Editor,

Sadly, we are once again witnessing another episode of cultist zealotry, politically harnessed to thwart a property owner’s rights to develop his own property in a manner he would like.

According to Leigh Goodstein’s article, Ronald Lauder appears to have taken pains to conform to the dictates, reasonable or otherwise, of the authoritarian bureaucracy in power. The design conforms to the wish list of the architectural review board and it complies with the mandated 150-foot setback from the pond. It is a modest 3,400-square-foot structure on a 38-acre parcel! Further, the property owner has given the bureaucrats an option to locate the driveway on whichever side of the pond they might prefer.

And still, the officious ideologists seek now retroactively to enlarge the required distance from the pond sixfold to 900 feet without any justification other than the dogma of the cult and lust for power to dictate, abusing the archaic nuance that the land is zoned for agriculture. In ironic contrast, the real-life agriculturist farming the land has no objection to the location of the improvements.

It is important to understand that the assault is not exclusively against Mr. Lauder, it is against all of us who sooner or later may wish to improve our properties, structurally or visually, in a manner that affords us maximum enjoyment in our precious leisure hours.

LESTER L. WEINDLING