Mike Boylan
By contrast, 53-year-old Mike Boylan, who has received the Gardiner Republican Committee endorsement for Town Board but is not enrolled in any party, has lived in the town since he was ten years old: His family moved to the area from Long Island in 1969, and he completed his formal education when he graduated from New Paltz High School in 1976. An avid skier like the rest of his family, Boylan toyed with living in Colorado briefly after high school but moved back to Gardiner because “I missed the distinct four seasons and the natural beauty.” Into 1982 he married into the Wright farming family and has worked as a hands-on grower, farm manager and part-owner of Wright’s Orchards ever since, bringing three children into the family business in the process.
As a function of his profession, Boylan is a member of the board of directors of the New York State Apple Association’s District 3. He was a member of the Gardiner Republican Committee in the 1980s and ‘90s and joined the Planning Board in 1994; he served as its chair “on and off for six or seven years,” he says, and still serves on that body. Under the Leroy Carlson administration, he was a member of Gardiner’s Building Ad Hoc Committee, which first laid out the options for renovating or replacing the outmoded Town Hall. He chaired the Master Plan Committee in 2004 and worked on the Zoning Advisory Committee that came up with the 2008 modifications to the Zoning Law.
In short, Boylan seems to have had a hand in nearly every facet of town government for the past couple of decades — except for the Town Board itself. He feels that he’s finally ready to take that big step: “I’ve put enough time in now on the Planning Board; I’ve paid attention to the issues.” One outcome of his having “been there, done that” for so long is that Boylan tends to chuckle at some of the partisan wrangling that can go on in a small town. “Every administration is faced with the issues of their time, and anybody can second-guess their decisions,” he says.
Of his tenure with the Planning Board, he says that he is most proud of “being consistent. We don’t make the code; we apply the code fairly. With any development proposal, there are always those who want it and those who don’t want it. Our job description is not to take a political or personal position on any one project.”
Although Gardiner Republicans tended to support the Awosting Reserve proposal, Boylan cites it as one example of a controversy that was manufactured and “totally political. There was no way, shape or form that that proposal would have ever flown under the old code,” due to nonconformities with guidelines for steep slopes, sewage, road access and a variety of other issues. Still, Boylan says, “I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but there’s a lot more to the Town of Gardiner than the Ridge: the CLI [Commercial/Light Industrial] District, the hamlet et cetera. I think that God — or Mother Nature — has already done a good job of saving the Ridge.”
Like Wiegand, Boylan seems comfortable with the existing Master Plan as a roadmap for planning decisions in Gardiner, but also notes that it is supposed to be reviewed every eight to ten years, “to see if our goals and priorities have changed with the makeup of the community” as Gardiner’s demographics shift over time. “Any Zoning Law is a moving target,” he says in respect of the recent controversies over the 2008 changes in that document, which he feels are often the result of “misunderstanding by applicants of the meaning of ‘use-by-right’…Any nonconformity may require referral to another body, and that takes time…Generally, applicants who stay on task and address issues in a diligent manner have moved through the system without much delay.”
Boylan is also on the same page with Wiegand on the need for the ZIC to come up with a recommendation for a procedural document that will “give people realistic expectations of timelines and expenditures” on the path to obtaining approval for their development proposals. Whenever someone applies, “There should be an informational meeting including the Building Inspector and the Town’s planning consultant right at the beginning of the process,” he says.
With regard to the cell tower controversy, Boylan recused himself from comment at the present time, since the issue is soon to come before the Town Board on which he hopes to serve. But he does seem somewhat amused by accusations of lack of transparency or public input in recent spending decisions that were outside the Town Board’s purview, such as the purchase of a half-million-dollar fire truck or the $750,000 mortgage on the new Gardiner Library: “I’ll bet that the folks who complained about the library decision not being fully disclosed were probably the same ones who other people complained didn’t tell them about the Fire District meeting.” Both groups, he says, “did it the way they were doing it forever. People who were interested came out. It was the higher dollar value that created the controversy. When expenditures exceed a certain dollar level, maybe there needs to be a review committee to ensure that the Town gets the best bang for the buck.”
Like every other candidate interviewed, Boylan emphasizes the need for fiscal responsibility, especially in tough times. “Just like in a household, we need to curb spending…In a small town like Gardiner, a good expenditure is running a smooth machine. We need to be lean and mean.” Unlike the state and federal governments, “We don’t have any ‘non-essential’ employees,” he points out. “We don’t have the capacity to keep taxes down right now, due to the lack of revenue from sales and mortgage taxes. Only four percent of what people pay in ‘local’ taxes is what we actually control; the rest goes to the county.”
Boylan sees hope ahead for less of the conflict and polarization that some people see as characterizing Gardiner politics. “There’s a lot of common ground,” he says. “We’ve all chosen to live in one of the most beautiful towns in Ulster County. Everybody wants the same thing; we’re just not talking about how to get there together…What I want to do is represent all members and parts of the community equally.”
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