Farm’s Response Leans on Emotion, Omits Key Facts, and Further Complicates Its Claim of Victimhood
By Kat Leslie
WARWICK — If Blue Arrow Farm hoped its recent public response would quiet criticism over its zoning battle with the Town of Warwick, it may have accomplished the opposite.
Let’s take a look at the issued rebuttal.
Blue Arrow Farms’ response spends considerable time disputing attendance estimates, parking counts, and whether town officials were “surprised” by the size of its events.
It is lengthy.
It is emotional.
It is full of indignation, appeals to sympathy, and repeated references to rescued animals.
What it is not particularly full of is accountability.
Because beneath the carefully crafted language and wounded tone lies a rather inconvenient reality: Blue Arrow still has not meaningfully disputed the central fact driving this entire controversy—
that it is operating well beyond the site plan it asked for, received, and was later convicted of violating.
Instead, the farm’s latest response reads less like a legal defense and more like a public relations strategy: when in doubt, flood the zone with sentiment, cry persecution, and hope no one notices the paperwork.
Unfortunately for Blue Arrow, the paperwork is rather difficult to ignore.
The Part Blue Arrow Keeps Dancing Around
For all the farm’s outrage, its response never squarely addresses the one issue that matters most:
Blue Arrow is not operating as approved.
The property at 86 Glenwood Road was never authorized as a large-scale concert venue, weekly car show destination, carnival grounds, or wedding-and-events enterprise.
It was approved for something far more modest: a butterfly garden, apiary, sunflower maze, nature walks, picnics, and storytelling center.
In other words, the Town approved a quaint countryside attraction. What arrived instead appears to be somewhere between an event venue and a roadside entertainment complex with livestock.
At some point, the use of the word farm begins to invite scrutiny.
Because if a property hosts more tribute bands than tractors, more car shows than crops, and more ticketed events than harvests, residents are entitled to ask what precisely is being farmed—other than the brand itself.
The question is no longer whether the use has changed.
It plainly has.
The question is why Blue Arrow Farms ( further Blue Arrow ) continues to fight that reality rather than formally apply for the approvals needed to legalize it.
From Planning Board to Petition Board
Faced with those realities, most business owners would do what every other applicant in Warwick must do:
Go back to the Planning Board.
Seek expanded approvals.
Submit revised plans.
Pay the fees.
Make the case.
Blue Arrow chose another route.
It skipped the process and launched a petition.
Because apparently, in the Don Oriolo doctrine of land use law, a Change.org signature from a stranger in Pennsylvania now carries the same weight as municipal approval.
Speaking of which —
According to petition analytics, the vast majority of supporters signing Blue Arrow’s petition come from outside Warwick’s local area, a staggering 71% of them from out of state altogether.
In other words: the loudest voices urging Warwick to bend its zoning laws may not live here at all.
So while the farm has presented the petition as proof of overwhelming local support, the actual data suggests the campaign is being buoyed heavily by people who do not vote here, do not live here, and will not be dealing with the traffic, noise, overflow parking, or enforcement implications.
A touching show of solidarity.
Also entirely irrelevant to zoning.
The Nonprofit Halo
Blue Arrow’s response leans heavily—repeatedly—on its status as a nonprofit animal sanctuary, as though that designation alone should render scrutiny impolite.
But nonprofit filings tell a story far less grandiose than the public messaging. Public records indicate the organization has not filed a 501(c)(3) return since 2022.
Over five years of reported filings, Blue Arrow’s nonprofit entity reported $217,402 in total revenue—roughly $43,000 per year.
That is not nothing.
But it is hardly the financial profile of a major rescue operation.
For comparison, the Warwick Valley Humane Society reported $4,179,483 over the same period—more than nineteen times Blue Arrow’s reported total!
And somehow, the Humane Society manages to operate without weekly concerts, tribute bands, or public pressure campaigns demanding exemption from local land-use laws.
One organization runs a major animal rescue through fundraising, donations, and compliance.
The other increasingly appears to use one as branding, arguing that weekly car shows and concerts are indispensable to its existence.
Readers may draw their own conclusions.
The ‘Back-Breaking’ Cost of Compliance
Blue Arrow’s response laments that engineering and review fees needed for an amended site plan could cost approximately $26,000, calling the amount “back-breaking” for a nonprofit operation.
That claim may tug at heartstrings, and inspire sympathy —
until one visits the non-profit president’s Key West art gallery, and considers the publicly advertised price of owner Don Oriolo’s work.
There, artwork bearing his name is listed publicly for prices ranging from thousands of dollars to $39,995.00 per piece.
Image source: Zazoo Fine Art Gallery
Which means two drawings of a cartoon cat by the owner would cover the alleged “back-breaking” hardship.
Which raises an obvious question:
If $26,000 is truly an impossible barrier to compliance, is the issue financial hardship—
—or simply unwillingness?
And if compliance is truly out of reach, the obstacle does not appear to be insolvency.
It appears to be priorities.
The Farmer in Pine Island… Living in Key West
Blue Arrow’s public messaging often evokes the image of a humble local farm operation struggling to preserve its mission.
Yet IRS filings list Blue Arrow President Don Oriolo’s address not in Pine Island, not in Warwick, not even in Orange County—but at a boat slip in Key West, Florida, where he owns and operates Zazoo Fine Art Gallery. According to the gallery’s profile “Don also owns and operates his own guitar manufacturing company, the Oriolo Guitar Company”.
That may not disqualify anyone from running an animal sanctuary.
But it does complicate the homespun picture of a humble rural operator scraping by to care for rescued goats and pigs. If one were imagining a straw hat, muddy boots, and dawn chores in the pasture — the records suggest a somewhat different aesthetic.
While the public is being sold a portrait of a struggling Pine Island farmer in overalls tending sanctuary animals — the official records paint something closer to a seasonal businessman with a tan, a gallery in paradise, and a side of rural branding.
A Familiar Defense: ‘Honest Mistake’
Those who find all of this strangely familiar may be interested to know this is not Oriolo’s first time explaining away legal trouble as misunderstanding.
As reported by the New York Post, Oriolo is currently embroiled in litigation with heirs tied to the Felix the Cat empire, who allege they were improperly cut out of ownership interests tied to rights valued at roughly $100 million.
Oriolo’s defense?
He long believed all the other shareholders were bought out decades ago, attorney Robert Meloni told The Post. “It was an honest mistake. We thought they had been bought out.”
In other words:
Another dispute.
Another accusation.
Another explanation amounting to some variation of — Whoops. Honest mistake.
To be clear, those allegations remain contested.
But to critics, it adds to a growing portrait, critics may argue, of a businessman repeatedly involved in disputes over boundaries—legal, procedural, or otherwise.
Readers may decide for themselves how many major “misunderstandings” one man is entitled to before coincidence begins looking more like a pattern.
Blue Arrow Too, Just not the Farm
And then there is the small matter of who actually owns the property.
Because despite the public branding, the land at 86 Glenwood Road is not held by “Blue Arrow Farm” at all, but by a separate entity with a conveniently similar name: Blue Arrow Too, LLC.
Why the distinction? Perhaps there is a perfectly innocent explanation.
But when a business asking the public for trust cannot keep its own corporate identities straight—and the property, nonprofit, operating entity, and public-facing brand all appear to blur together depending on the circumstance—it does little to dispel the growing impression that the deeper one looks, the more complicated the ownership and operating structure appears.
Victimhood, Meet the Record
Strip away the rhetoric of Blue Arrow latest public response, and the sequence of events is difficult to interpret as persecution:
Blue Arrow was cited.
Blue Arrow was warned.
Blue Arrow was offered a path to compliance.
Blue Arrow declined.
Blue Arrow was convicted.
Blue Arrow launched a petition.
And now Blue Arrow would like the public to believe the real problem here is municipal overreach.
At some point, victimhood ceases to be persuasive when the record becomes this long.
Because this is no longer about whether residents enjoy the Wednesday night car show.
Or whether rescued animals deserve care.
Or even whether Blue Arrow has the right to grow.
It is about whether one business owner gets to bypass the same process every other applicant must endure.
Whether public sympathy nullifies the rules every other property owner is expected to follow.
Whether Facebook likes carry more weight than zoning law.
Whether enough signatures can erase the limits of a legally approved site plan.
And if the answer to any of that is yes, then Warwick’s zoning code ceases to be law in any meaningful sense and becomes merely a suggestion—subject to revision by petition, popularity, and bolstered by out-of-state support.
