To the Editor:

I did not want to involve anyone else in my issues with the town of Knox, but this has a great deal to do with my property on Singer Road so I have a very big dog in this fight.

Also, I have Henry Whipple’s permission to use his name.

This letter addresses the correction that ran in the March 28, 2019 Enterprise.

Henry Whipple is a decent and honest man and, after a considerable amount of time on the phone, this is what I’ve been able to establish:

In 1989, Henry created the Singer Road subdivision, and to do this he had RD Snyder, land surveyors, survey an 83.16-acre parcel on Singer Road before he could apply to the Knox Planning Board to have this divided into lots.

As part of the survey, RD Snyder supplied Henry with a survey map.

In 1990, I bought Lot 6 on Singer Road, and Henry gave me a 36-by-44-inch copy of this survey map from 1989.

In 1998, Henry was handling the sale of Lot 5 on Singer Road for Mary Ellen Vertucci and Albert Edwardson, and he took a copy of a portion of the 1989 Singer Road survey map, wrote some things on it and left it at the site of Lot 5.

And that's it.

Because it was not in print yet, I read Henry the correction on the phone and he said it sounded OK, but I pointed out to Henry that it was saying he hired someone to draw a map.

Henry told me this could look like he just hired some guy to draw a map up, but there was no reason for this as he had the survey map from 1989.

John Dorfman, former Knox town attorney, said that Henry testified that he had “prepared” the map, but I don’t remember what Henry had said in court about this.

The main thing I remember was that Henry had testified that the property lines were marked out when he sold Lot 5.

If writing “a few notes on the survey map” is “preparing” a map then this may be seen as a valid statement, and The Enterprise may have “misconstrued” this to mean Henry had hand-drawn the map.

Also, the correction says the map was drawn in 2011, while the actual survey map was from 1989, and the map with the handwriting on it would have been from around 1998.

In the fall of 2013, I showed Henry the “tax map,” as John Dorfman called it, and he said he had written things on it but he didn’t put an arrow on it going from the words “proposed well” to a dot, and recently I pointed out to Henry that the shape of the “leach bed” was changed to what is there now.

Henry could not know what the shape of a leach bed would be before the lot was sold.

In a deposition in March of 2013, Gerald Hackstadt, owner of Lot 5 (now 98 Singer Road), testified that the map he picked up at the Lot 5 site was the same way it was.

That is not true.

Another thing is that the July 11, 2013 story in The Enterprise refers to a “hand-drawn plot plan on which the well was labeled with an incorrect distance from the property line.”

As part of the building permit application in 1999, Gerald Hackstadt filled out an actual plot plan form from the town showing the setbacks for the house at 98 Singer Road.

The town had no records of any maps associated with 98 Singer Road until Hackstadt gave the town the map he said he got from Henry Whipple, so this map was not a “plot plan” either.

OK. So it’s been established that there was a survey in 1989, and the map left at Lot 5 on Singer Road was a section of the map from the survey of 1989 with “a few notes” written on it.

So why would John Dorfman and Robert Edwards say there was no survey?

The Hackstadt house was built almost 30 feet into a 50-foot setback, but it has a certificate of occupancy from 2001 saying everything is legal.

When it was shown that the house was in violation, the town couldn't do anything about this because the house has no inspection reports.

If the house had not been inspected, the issuing of a certificate of occupancy would be in violation of New York State law, so the town and the Hackstadts had to work together to figure out how to justify the house being in violation of the setback requirement.

So, someone put an arrow on the map showing the well and the house to be in alignment and outside the setback area when they were not, and then used this to justify the granting of a variance.

In the fall of 2013, when Henry Whipple told me he didn’t put the arrow on this map, I was thinking something close to, “Oh, he (Hackstadt) made it look like the well and house lined up to get a variance,” and I didn't think too much about it.

After trial, I looked at New York State penal law to see if this would be a “forged instrument” and, to my reading of the law, it would be.

So, someone created a “forged instrument” to obtain a variance and then put the responsibility for where the house is on the Realtor who sold the lot.

Vince Virano

Albany