Great Gorge residents may seek court help

VERNON — Residents of Great Gorge Village say a court order may be their last hope to take back control of their community.
Members of the nearly 400-strong group Great Gorge Residents United are seeking change to remedy alleged negligence and corruption in the village's leadership ranks that they claim have left the residential grounds in disrepair.
Despite paying dues totaling around $5.5 million each year, residents said Sunday they're getting little in return. They claimed the management and maintenance contractors hired by Great Gorge Village haven't been doing their jobs, leaving them with cracked and crumbling parking lots and walkways and rotting wooden stairs with which to access their homes.
Yet those same contractors — All-American Landscaping, Comet Management and Comet Security — recently received early renewal of their service contracts, each for another five year term.
GGRU members said the Village's Master Council could have saved money on those services by opting for a lower-priced competitive bidder, but alleged corruption within that body made the decision a foregone conclusion. They added they feel powerless to change the situation without court intervention.
“With that money, there are so many more things we could do — build more parking, paint the buildings, roof things – there's a number of things we could do that would make this place so much better, but we can't do it because the bylaws are restrictive and advantaged toward the corporate leadership,” resident Len Coloccia said. “The election process is moot; the process is completely ineffective.”
That's because a clause in the community's bylaws requires 51 percent of residents to vote to make a change, whether it's electing a new section council member (each section council votes for one of its own members to represent it on the Master Council, which is the community's chief decision-making body) or revising the bylaws themselves. Without that 51 percent majority, things – and council members – remain the same.
GGRU members acknowledged voter turnout is definitely part of the problem. For example, a recent referendum effort to change that 51 percent to a 35 percent requirement only garnered around 20 percent voter turnout, residents noted. But Coloccia said that's because voters feel like they aren't being heard even when they do participate.
“Voters feel apathetic, they feel their vote doesn't count,” Coloccia said. “They've been dismissed, they've been canceled on, they've been not listened to, so they give up. They throw their hands in the air and they give up.”
Stuck in this loop, GGRU members said they believe the only way to take back control of their community is through the intervention of the courts to help them change the bylaws and purge what they called “legacy “Master Council members.
GGRU has raised more than $2,700 through an online fundraising campaign to pay for an attorney, filing fees and court costs. There are less than 25 days left for the group to reach its $15,000 fundraising goal.