Caught Lying About Sands Ring.
Now They Want Your Trust On The Comp Plan.

On the night of February 24, 2026, residents packed the courtroom at 183 Main Street to ask one question about the proposed "Storm King Decision" earthwork at Sands-Ring Homestead: who is going to pay for this?

Councilwoman Rokhsha Michael-Razi answered them on the record:

Deputy Supervisor Timothy McCarty went further, telling residents he was drawing a hard line on the town's exposure:

Supervisor Josh Wojehowski then framed the approval as conditional — promising the agreement would forbid town spending on the project:

Reassured by all of that, the board voted 5–0 to approve the installation at the Sands-Ring Homestead — "subject to conditions" that hadn't been written yet.

Cornwall Truth has obtained the executed Artwork Exhibition Agreement between the Town of Cornwall and Newburgh Antique Gallery LLC (the corporate vehicle for artist Vivien Collens), signed on May 7 and May 11, 2026.

The conditions the Supervisor promised the public are not in it.

What is in it — under "Section 4. Town Obligations" — is a list of things the Town of Cornwall is legally bound to provide for this private artist's installation, at the Town's expense:

Fencing. Lighting. Cameras. Police patrols. Promotion. A secured staging area. None of that is free. None of it comes from the artist. Every line item on that list is a Town of Cornwall cost — paid for by the same Cornwall taxpayers Councilwoman Michael-Razi assured wouldn't be footing the bill.

The contract also requires the Town to verify and accept the artist's insurance — $1 million per occurrence, $2 million aggregate — and grants the Town reproduction rights only for "non-commercial promotion, news, and archival purposes." The Town pays for the security, the staging, the insurance review, and the promotion. The artist keeps the copyright.

The "conditions" Supervisor Wojehowski promised would protect the town — "town staff and town supplies and town equipment can't be used" — appear nowhere in the executed agreement.

The contract is one thing. What is happening on the ground is another.

The installation schedule in the agreement calls for "digging trench for hose and electric" on April 28–30, and after de-installation in November, restoration of the site to substantially the same condition. The contract does not say who performs that work. The Supervisor told the public on February 24 it would not be the town.

It is the town.

At the Sands-Ring site, the trench for water and electric service to the installation was cut with a trencher, alongside the town's own skid steer and a town dump truck staged on the property to support the work. After the staging area was disturbed, the ground was seeded — not by the artist's crew, but as part of the town's restoration of its own land.

That is town personnel, town equipment, town gas, and town manpower — precisely the four categories Deputy Supervisor McCarty told residents he was "not in favor of at all." The skid steer and the dump truck parked at Sands-Ring did not drive themselves there. The seed did not spread itself.

Cornwall taxpayers paid for that labor. They paid for the fuel. They paid for the wear on the equipment. They paid the wages of the highway and buildings & grounds crews while those crews were not performing the public work residents are taxed to receive. None of that cost appears as a line item against the art project — which is precisely how a project advertised as "all on them" quietly becomes "on us."

Add it up. In the same fiscal year that Cornwall residents absorbed a 32% single-year tax increase (FY26), in the same budget cycle Deputy Supervisor McCarty publicly called "squeaky tight":

And in the background: a Supervisor's salary that has climbed roughly $20,700 (≈27%) since 2022 while residents' bills climbed 48%, and an administration carrying $30 million in cumulative borrowing with no plan to pay it back.

The math is no longer abstract. The board members who voted yes on February 24 told the room one thing and signed a contract that says another. The town crews told to stay off the site are on the site, with the town's own skid steer and dump truck parked next to them.

There is a word for the gap between what you are told and what you sign. Cornwall residents are entitled to use it.

This is not a story about an earthwork sculpture. Not really.

It is a story about whether the public statements coming out of Cornwall Town Hall can be trusted to match what gets signed, built, dug, and paid for after the meeting ends.

On February 24, three of the five people sitting on the dais looked the room in the eye and made specific, factual, on-the-record promises:

• Taxpayer money would not pay for the project.
• Town personnel, equipment, gas, and manpower would not be used.
• The agreement would be drafted to lock those promises in.

Every one of those promises has now been contradicted — by the contract they signed, and by the trencher, skid steer, dump truck, and bag of seed at the site.

And this was the easy question. A temporary art installation. Five months of obligations. A budget impact small enough to hide inside the highway department's overtime line. On the simple stuff — the stuff where the residents in the room could check the work in real time — the administration could not, or would not, tell it straight.

The Comp Plan is not a temporary installation. It is the legal scaffolding for rezoning Cornwall — uncapped apartments over storefronts, multi-family in commercial zones, looser ADU rules, streamlined multi-family approvals, all rated Immediate priority. The same supervisor, the same board, the same town attorney, the same staff will be telling residents what the Plan does and doesn't do, what it will and won't cost, and what it will and won't change.

On February 24, we got a controlled test of that trustworthiness. The result is in the ground at Sands-Ring.

Cornwall residents are being asked, in the same calendar year, to take this administration's word on a document that will reshape the town for a generation. Before they do, they are entitled to weigh that ask against what just happened on a project small enough to verify with their own eyes.

The standard is simple. If you can't be trusted on the small things, you don't get the benefit of the doubt on the big ones.