No one is really ever in Rye Town, a Sound Shore community not to be confused with the city of Rye, an independent neighbor known for its affluent suburban neighborhoods and Purchase Street shopping district.
There really is no town, geographically speaking, because its entire square footage is part of the villages of Port Chester, Rye Brook and Mamaroneck. There are no Rye Town addresses, there is no Rye Town High School and there are fewer than 10 employees in Town Hall, which has a Port Chester mailing address.
With no unified local identity and a government that seems to offer only duplicate services, dissolving the town as a cost-savings measure would seem like low-hanging fruit in Westchester County, where residents pay the highest property taxes in the nation.
Joseph Carvin, the supervisor of the town, who has a Rye Brook mailing address, has been pushing for six years to shutter the government he heads and voluntarily put himself out of the job. He said New York has become financially unsustainable, with the cost of government inflating property taxes and elbowing out businesses and residents.
“There”™s a desperate need to rationalize local government,” he told the Business Journal. “It”™s time to stop the insanity. Until people begin to understand that, we”™re going to continue to have problems.”
Yet, the road to consolidation has been a long one for the town, paved with red tape and a maze of legal questions. Ultimately, dissolving the town will need to be approved by a public vote, and Carvin hopes to bring that vote by November 2015 or early 2016.
Although the villages mostly agree with the notion that the continued existence of Rye Town is unnecessary, the complicated layers of governance raise some questions for the communities that would soldier on after Rye Town breathes its last.
Of the many villages in New York state, most have their own governments and services but are contained within a larger town or city. In Westchester, for example, the villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe are their own municipalities, but part of the town of Eastchester. The area of the town that isn”™t part of the villages is often called “unincorporated” and is geographically the area that residents and outsiders identify as “Eastchester.” Most towns and their villages function this way, including Westchester”™s largest town, Greenburgh, which has six villages. Rye Town is unique in that there has been no unincorporated area of the town since the 1980s, when Rye Brook formed its own municipal government.
The common thought for years has been that the state constitution requires all villages to sit below a town or city, which dictated the holdup for a Rye Town dissolution. If Rye Town were to cease to exist, officials believed the villages of Port Chester and Rye Brook would need to become “coterminous” town-villages.
That would be problematic for the Rye Neck section of the village of Mamaroneck. The neighborhood is partly in the town of Mamaroneck, as is most of Mamaroneck Village, but a small sliver of the area is in Rye Town. If the town disappears, some of Rye Neck would be left without an overarching town.
Mamaroneck Town wasn”™t agreeable to annexing that sliver, which receives police and other services from Mamaroneck Village. A possible solution was having Rye function as a “paper government,” which many believed could be more trouble than it was worth. The consolidation effort was put on hold.
Then, last month, state Assemblyman Steve Otis, a Democrat, said the common theory that all villages must be part of a town or city was wrong. He pored through state doctrine and consulted with legal experts, he said.
“I looked and I looked and I looked again and it”™s not there,” he said. “Rye Neck can function as it”™s basically been functioning.” Otis said he would sponsor legislation in the state for any dissolution once the villages agree how to proceed.
Mamaroneck Village Mayor Norman Rosenblum, though, said his government”™s legal counsel is convinced Rye Neck would need a town overseeing it. Ideally, Rosenblum told the Business Journal, he”™d like to remove Rye Town and Mamaroneck Town, with the unincorporated area of Mamaroneck consolidating with the village of Larchmont. Mamaroneck Village would then rebrand as a coterminous community called the Town/Village of Mamaroneck Harbor. This would prevent villagers from paying into town taxes, he said.
“We have our own services; it may be a smaller percentage, but you”™re still paying for those services you don”™t get,” he said. The coterminous status would mean the village also gets a higher share of state sales taxes being passed back down locally, he said. Still, he felt the dissolution process was dead due to unanswered questions about the town structure and other complications. For example, although the villages of Mamaroneck and Port Chester have their own courts, Rye Brook does not, meaning it would have to establish its own court system or consolidate with Port Chester if Rye Town ceased to exist.
Carvin, the Rye Town supervisor, said he was optimistic the transition would be smooth so long as it is done one step at a time. The most important thing, he said, was to give residents the choice to decide whether or not Rye Town should be given the ax.
“We”™re talking about the most insane governmental structure in the history of mankind,” Carvin said.
