Is this developer for real?
Goshen water park developer leaves stream of broken promises
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Designs for Bouchville Manors' water park include a variety of tubes, slides and other attractions. Photo provided
By Michael Levensohn
Times Herald-Record
August 07
Before Goshen, there was Woodbury.
Before Woodbury, there was Chester.
Before Chester, there was a missile silo near Lake Placid.
All are places where Liliana Trafficante has proposed building a water park in the past few years.
So far, though, all she's managed to build is a reputation for stringing sellers along and failing to pay her bills.
Trafficante, who works out of a Manhattan office, is the founder of Bouchville Manors. The organization is dedicated to finding jobs for young people leaving foster care, according to its Web site.
Trafficante's latest effort in that quest is the GoOcean water park and resort. Trafficante said she'd like to build a $100 million-plus complex including an indoor/outdoor water park, a hotel, retail space and housing on a 120-acre parcel near Route 17's Exit 124.
The project would include housing for young adults making the transition out of foster care. They would work at the water park and hotel and gain valuable career skills, said Trafficante, who has fashioned a persona as a crusader for children's rights.
She's a 1985 graduate of the Dwight School, a private elementary and secondary school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The school's mission is to prepare students for a life of public service. It expects its students to "use their unique 'spark of genius' to build a better world, " according to the Dwight Web site.
Former business associates say Trafficante fixed on the idea of a water park and mini village for foster kids as long as a decade ago. The history of the project is memorialized in virtual scraps of paper scattered across the Internet, many with missing words and other typos.
One of the earliest, a 2002 PRWeb news release, announced that Trafficante's companies, Bouchville Manors and International Dreams, planned to build "The First Foster Home, mini park, and water park in history housed in a missile."
The document seeks financial assistance. "EMMEDIATE INVESTOR ACTION NEEDED $5,000.00 to start and 45 million in purchase and construction, " it reads.
The Lake Placid plan never materialized, and by 2003 or Trafficante had turned her attention to Orange County.
In an Oct. 8, online news release, Trafficante announced plans to break ground on a foster home, mini-town and water park the following April in Chester. She tried to buy a home with land there, but the deal fell through when she didn't come up with cash, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Before she pulled up stakes in Chester, Trafficante began negotiating to buy property in Woodbury from Rutherford Chemicals, the owner of the Nepera chemical plant there.
That deal never materialized, either. Trafficante claimed she passed on the site because of its proximity to the chemical plant.
"That whole plant sitting there didn't sit right with me, " she said during an interview in mid-July.
Others familiar with the Rutherford Chemicals deal say Trafficante was unable to come up with any money.
Not that she didn't try. She took her project to a dozen or more possible financiers, according to documents obtained by the Times Herald-Record.in a press release dated Aug. 1, Trafficante sought donors for a Monopoly-style game called Bouch-opoly. Spots on the game board would sell for $175 to $600. An online flier for an April 10, Jazz for Peace concert to benefit Bouchville Manors doesn't name a location for the project but proclaims that the water park and mini village will celebrate a grand opening in September.
Trafficante's causes are trumpeted on a variety of Web sites, including several (www.goocean.com, www.bouchville.org, www.childabusecharity.Biz) that appear to exist solely for that purpose. Bouchville Manors has an msn group, a Yahoo! Group and a MySpace page. It solicits donations through sites like payitforward.org and bricksrus.com, and accepts payments through PayPal.
Bouchville Manors even has an online store (www.cafepress.com/themanors) selling $21 T-shirts and $2 buttons.
It's unclear how much Trafficante has raised through all of these outlets, and where the money has gone. None of Trafficante's businesses is registered as a charity.in mid-July, she said Bouchville Manors used to operate under the auspices of an unrelated nonprofit. Documents identify the nonprofit as Near Town and Associates.
Trafficante said she's in the process of setting up a new nonprofit. Her bills, meanwhile, continue to pile up, from a $700,000-plus judgment obtained by a developer she worked with to a $14,000 bill from a consulting firm that threatened to sue over payment for a feasibility study for the water park.
In Goshen, Trafficante has fallen off the radar almost as quickly as she appeared. It's been three weeks since two stories ran in the Times Herald-Record detailing her plans, as well as her efforts to solicit a letter of support from Goshen Mayor Bob Weinberger.
The letter, Trafficante said, was the last thing she needed before a hedge fund would release money so she could buy the Goshen site. Trafficante declined to name the hedge fund.
Weinberger refused to provide the letter, suggesting instead that Trafficante follow the usual municipal review procedures. Since then, the onslaught of phone calls from Trafficante and Co. Have stopped.
Trafficante did not return multiple calls seeking comment for this story. She hasn't yet submitted plans of any kind to the Village of Goshen.
But a blurb on bouchville.org says construction of GoOcean is "to begin ASAP."
Ccitizen
Manhatten, New York
U.S.A.
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