"Convince Chrissy To Talk." The Emails The Town Won't Turn Over.
A document packet privately submitted to Cornwall Truth traces how the Tree Top warehouse fight and the Comprehensive Plan became one story — in the words of the people running it. The emails were written to and from Town officials. Records requests bearing on them have gone unanswered. Today we publish the packet in full.
Cornwall Truth has received, through a private submission, a packet of Town of Cornwall correspondence, a Town Board resolution, and a consultant report concerning the Tree Top application on the Cornwall Commons property and the reopening of the Comprehensive Plan. We are publishing it unedited, below, so you can read the record yourself. The documents are consistent with the public record where they touch it — the February 2025 resolution, the April 2025 meeting video. Here is what they show, and the questions they leave that the Town has so far refused to answer.
The Documented Timeline
| Date | What Happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 3, 2023 | Edward "Ted" Warren of the Hudson Highlands Land Trust — writing "in my CCAC capacity" — emails Supervisor Wojehowski and Wynn Gold proposing the land trust pay a consultant to "create more robust objections" to the Tree Top DEIS, strong enough to "convince Chrissy to talk." He floats trading the NYMA parcels for a smaller Commons project. | Exhibit A |
| Aug 17, 2023 | Warren asks the Town for the DEIS itself, "for interested agencies" — signing as an officer of the land trust. | Exhibit B |
| Feb 15, 2024 | Hudsonia Ltd. delivers a biodiversity assessment prepared expressly for the land trust. It concludes the applicant's DEIS is deficient. | Exhibit C |
| Feb 25, 2025 | The Town Board reopens the Comprehensive Plan, creates a five-member advisory committee, and names Wynn Gold chairman on the spot — reserving one seat for the Conservation Advisory Committee. | Exhibit D |
| Feb 25, 2025 | The same night, resident Angelo Schembari says Gold told him the committee had already been picked — though the resolution left four of five seats to a later vote. | Witness account |
| Mar 10, 2025 | Warren tells Gold his Executive Director sees "no internal reason why I would not be able to sit" on the committee. He is appointed. | Exhibit E |
| Apr 8, 2025 | At the special meeting with the Commons owners, the Supervisor says on video: "the idea came up, let's reach out to the property owners." | Meeting video, 4:50 |
The Email That Explains Everything
Start with Exhibit A. On August 3, 2023 — during the public comment period on the Tree Top warehouse — Warren wrote to the Supervisor and to Wynn Gold. He was not writing as a concerned neighbor. He asked whether there had been "any substantive conversations with Chrissy Amato," said he saw "a big picture connection between whatever might happen with the NYMA property and the Tree Top parcel/project," and then laid out the trade: if the Town were to "somehow acquire the NYMA parcels," could it "trade Chrissy the donut hole in exchange for a smaller (but still lucrative enough) project"?
Then the sentence that turns an environmental review into an instrument:
Could there be some value to HHLT throwing some money at a consultant to review the DEIS and create more robust objections that might convince Chrissy to talk?— Edward Warren to Supervisor Wojehowski and Wynn Gold, August 3, 2023 (Exhibit A)
Read it again. The expert findings are being budgeted before anyone knows what they will say. The objections are not the point — the pressure is. He closes by acknowledging that "because of Dick and Co.'s lack luster spot zoning she kind of has the town over a barrel," and hoping the owner "might be open to some suggestions that are a little more creative than f***ing warehouses." SEQRA's public comment period exists so a lead agency can weigh environmental impacts. In this email, between a land trust officer and the town's top elected official, it is discussed as leverage to force a landowner to the table.
Four Hats, One Man, No Disclosure
Follow Warren through the record. In August 2023 he is an opponent of the project, proposing his private employer fund objections to it. Two weeks later he uses a Town-facing request to obtain the Town's review documents "for interested agencies." In February 2024 the study his employer commissioned arrives, concluding — as budgeted — that the DEIS is deficient. And in March 2025, after checking with his Executive Director (not with the public, and not, so far as any record shows, through any public conflict disclosure), he takes a seat on the committee writing the Town plan that governs the same land. The seat he fills is the one the resolution reserved for the Conservation Advisory Committee — the same "CCAC capacity" he invoked in the 2023 email. At every step the instrument is a public process. At no step is the public in the conversation.
"The Idea Came Up"
Now put the packet next to the tape. At the April 8, 2025 special meeting — the one where the 490-unit Cornwall Commons proposal came back off the shelf — the Supervisor described the outreach to the owners this way: "the idea came up, let's reach out to the property owners." It's on the video at 4:50. The idea did not just come up. It had been put to him in writing, twenty months earlier, by Warren — complete with the parcel swap and the pressure campaign. When the person who received the plan in 2023 describes it in 2025 as a spontaneous thought, that is not a memory lapse. That is a story being managed.
And notice what the 2023 email already contained: NYMA and Cornwall Commons, linked as one transaction. Three years later, the Comprehensive Plan pre-commits a NYMA rezone "per request from applicant" while the Commons housing plan is revived at a special meeting. The "big picture connection" Warren described in private in 2023 is now the architecture of the town's foundational planning document. We did not connect these parcels. Their own correspondence did.
The Questions The Town Won't Answer
This packet establishes dates, authorship, recipients, and text. It does not establish that anyone profited, and we will not pretend otherwise. So we are asking, publicly, the questions the documents raise:
Has anyone gained anything? Who retained Hudsonia, on what date, and on what terms? Did any official, committee member, or private party stand to benefit — through a land swap, an appointment, an acquisition, or otherwise — from the pressure campaign described in Exhibit A? If the answer is no one, the records will show it. Release them.
Was the conflict ever disclosed? Did the Conservation Advisory Council know one of its members was simultaneously acting for a private organization with an interest in a pending application? Did the Town Board know before it made the appointment?
Why won't the Town turn over these emails? Every email in this packet was sent to or from Town officials — they sit on the Town's own systems, and they are public records under the Freedom of Information Law. Yet records requests bearing on exactly these questions have gone unanswered. Cornwall Truth should not have needed a private submission to show you correspondence you already own. What is in the rest of it?
A town with nothing to hide answers its FOIL requests. A town that answers "the idea came up" while sitting on the email where the idea was actually proposed is not confused about the record. It is hoping you never see it. Today you can.
No document in this packet proves an agreement, an exchange of value, or that any appointment was fixed before the Board acted. Readers are entitled to draw their own inferences — or to decline to. What the documents do establish is this: the environmental review was discussed as leverage; the study was bought with its conclusion pre-ordered; the man who proposed it now helps write the Plan governing the land; the Supervisor's public account contradicts his own inbox; and the Town, asked for these records under the law, went silent. The packet is below, unedited. Read it yourself.