New York Times
Anger Over a Camp's Conversion
(November 26, 1998)
By CLAIDIA ROWE
RIFTON, N.Y. -- In a region filled with monasteries, churches and religious retreats of every stripe, one might think a Christian conference center could slip in with barely a ripple.
But as neighbors here began to chat among themselves about what was going on at the old Goddard-Riverside Community Center campground, quiet concerns grew into nagging worries, because the site was turning into a sprawling Christian complex.
Rifton, a tiny hamlet of 150 people in the Ulster County town of Esopus, consists of a post office, a general store and a small library. If Tom Mahairas has his way, it will also be a next-door neighbor to his Citivision Conference Center, a year-round religious retreat playing host to as many as 700 people for banquets, concerts, fund-raisers and prayer groups.
In his literature, Pastor Mahairas, as he calls himself, has advertised the site as a camp for city children and a meeting center for all manner of religious activities related to ministries he has founded. To his neighbors, however, he has insisted that the 174-acre site, with its stunning mountain views, private lake and majestic trees, will be a place for meditation, quiet reflection and communion with nature.
"It's going to be a positive, hopeful place, a joyful place," he said. The neighbors are not so sure. Noise from six teen-age boys tearing across Claude Samton's property on all-terrain vehicles this summer led Mr. Samton, a New York City architect, to take a look for himself after the boys said they were from the youth camp up the road.
"There were a dozen bulldozers up there, and I realized that this was not just a youth camp where he's building a few bunks," he said. "That's a joke. This is a huge project. It's a religious theme park."
Legally, Mr. Mahairas may do what he wants on the site as long as he continues to use it the way Goddard-Riverside did, as a rustic camp for children. The question is: Does a 700-person compound open year round with a "Wild, Wild West" fort, heated dormitories, a chapel, a banquet hall and a "Hoop Heaven" of N.B.A.-sized basketball courts qualify? A growing number of neighbors and town officials think not.
Mr. Mahairas is not new to town. Fifteen years ago, he said, he bought land seven miles away in Esopus with plans to open a religious center for men with "life-controlling problems."
Officials, however, remember the proposal differently.
"It was an abandoned children's camp and they just moved in and took it over, saying they were going to re-establish it as a boys' camp and bring youth up from the city," said Marilyn Coffey, who was the town's Supervisor at the time. "But it was not a youth camp. By the time we realized what was going on, it was a men's drug and alcohol rehab center." The center remains in operation.
Based on that experience, she said she would watch Mr. Mahairas's latest enterprise closely.
To Mr. Mahairas's supporters in town, that and a host of other complaints are simply transparent excuses for religious prejudice among "ultraliberal tree-huggers," as one man called the pastor's angry neighbors.
Some residents in this predominantly Democratic community have hinted that Mr. Mahairas may be closely aligned with the religious right wing. He refuses to say where the money to finance his $1 million enterprise has come from, but counts the Rev. Billy Graham and the Rev. Jerry Falwell among his friends.
"We've got two issues here, an issue of religious prejudice and of prejudice against children," said Ira Weiner, a former Town Board member and political commentator on the local cable television program, Focus on Esopus." Any time a religious group comes around here, the word 'cult' seems to crop up."
Mr. Mahairas, 49, a New York City native, speaks compellingly about his conversion from drug-addicted teen-ager to preacher of the Gospel. He claims ties to more than 400 churches and pastors around the country and says he has founded a half-dozen ministries in New York City over the last 25 years, including the Manhattan Bible Church, the Manhattan Christian Academy, the Transformation Life Center, New York Gospel Outreach and the Love Kitchen. He envisions Rifton as a place where the branches of all his ministries will meet.
His enthusiasm overflows, yet Mr. Mahairas is skillful at tailoring his message to whoever might be listening.
Walking around with a television crew from Focus on Esopus Television, he avoided showing dormitory rooms with comfortable-looking double beds, focusing instead on the spartan bunks next door.
When he candidly announced to the camera, "We want to expand," the show's producer, Greg Gulbrandsen, who supports Mr. Mahairas's mission, urged him to use another word and taped the segment again. (Mr. Gulbrandsen said later that he wanted to keep the focus on Mr. Mahairas's immediate plans.)
"I just want to maximize what's there," Mr. Mahairas said with a shrug. "It's not like I’ve got some devious plan." He said that the site had been a camp for various organizations since 1924.
Work at the site continues. An increasing number of neighbors have complained to the Town Board that Citivision is polluting streams, improperly clear-cutting trees and otherwise threatening the environment. They fear that hundreds of people traveling up and down narrow Carney Road will cause traffic problems, strain the water and sewage systems and overtax the one-engine volunteer fire department.
"None of us are against having a camp here," said Robin Bruch, a painter who fled to the quiet of Rifton when a dirt-bike track was built next door to her previous home in Phoenicia. "It's just the complete disregard for the neighborhood, the environment and the neighborhood's value system."
After months of meeting in one another’s living rooms, about 30 neighbors voiced their concerns at a Town Board meeting in October. Afterward, Mr. Mahairas was barred from undertaking any new construction before submitting a detailed site plan, and was told he would have to pay for a full-scale study of the environmental impact his plans would have on the area, easily costing another $100,000.
"That's 10 kids I could help with that money," he said later.
He won little sympathy from Ray Rice, the Town Supervisor, who was blunt about his discomfort with another tax-exempt religious organization's taking up residence in the town. Already, 25 percent of Esopus is owned by such groups as the Marist Brothers and Christian Brothers, the Holy Cross Monastery and the Hutterian Bruderhof, a communal religious sect, which had been paying taxes but recently applied for an exemption.
In addition, Citivision makes money from selling felled trees to logging companies and is not required to contribute any part of that income to the town. (Mr. Mahairas says he gives the local fire department $1,350 a year as a "gesture of good "My personal feeling is that religious groups should be able to have a tax exemption on their religious edifice," the Supervisor said, "but not on hundreds of acres."
Down the road from Citivision, Mr. Mahairas's closest neighbor, Bill Schoenfisch, was fuming about that and other matters.
"It's an absolute free ride," he said, staring at the stream on his property that had grown thick with mud from the construction above. "They don't pay a dime and nobody really knows what we're dealing with here. The town is afraid to ask. Everybody's afraid of being labeled as against religion, against Christendom, against the work they're doing with kids."
At the recent town meeting, Mr. Mahairas, wearing a sleek olive suit and a gold tie, tried to answer his critics, most of whom were in jeans and flannel shirts. He said that logging in the woods would help to "clean up" the environment, that rowdy teen-agers had been dealt with and that he was doing his best to be a "good neighbor."
It was the townspeople, he said, who were not being neighborly. "I'm allowed to dream if I want to," he said later. "I'm a creative person. Somebody can't begin to start screaming just because you have a dream.'
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