In Hurley, town-board member Mike Boms is challenging against incumbent town supervisor Melinda McKnight for the top seat in the June 27 Democratic primary.
Mike Boms
Mike Boms, a two-term town board member, has been a teacher for more than 50 years. He taught for many years in the Onteora schools and now teaches biosciences at Marist College and SUNY New Paltz. He has one child and two grandchildren. Boms has been resident of Hurley for seven years, previously living in Olivebridge. He was originally from Brooklyn.
Boms said he was running for supervisor because he disagrees with the way McKnight is doing things. “She’s making unilateral decisions without coming to the board,” he said. “I’m really upset about the fact that she accused our superintendent of highways of being an obstructionist with the temporary garage when that’s not true at all. She’s very divisive.”
Boms said he has good people skills as a teacher that he can bring to the governmental table: “I’ve spoken to kids, students, parents all the time, and I can defuse situations.”
To stop the divisiveness between the public and board at meetings, Boms said listening was the key. “I would hear them out and reassure them that it’s going to be taken care of,” Boms said. “The thing is, what I am seeing right now, that a lot of times when someone complains about certain things, the supervisor will say come to my office and we’ll discuss it. It’s always discussed behind closed doors. Right now, there’s constant fighting between some members of town board and the highway department. You can’t do that. We have to work together to get things done. Your personal differences, your personal animosity, you have to leave at the door, you have to look at what’s good for the town. So I want to first improve that.”
Boms noted supply-chain problems as an example. Highway superintendent Mike Shultis has requested vehicles or equipment that had to be purchased immediately before prices went up.
Boms said the town needed to be more fiscally conservative because a lot of the taxpayers are on fixed incomes. “I would like to go through all the budget lines, and see exactly where we can trim where it’s still going to be safe,” he said.
Boms thought a major focus should be on getting reliable water to the citizens of West Hurley, serviced in some sections by Hudson Valley Water Company, a private entity. Residents have complained about frequent outages, contamination and billing irregularities.
Money from the federal infrastructure bill and the state could be used to tap into a potentially huge water source near the former West Hurley Elementary School.
Boms said the highway superintendent was excluded from the selection of a temporary highway garage, a claim McKnight disputes. Boms disagrees with McKnight’s claim the site for a permanent garage favored by superintendent Shultis was on parkland.
Boms blames the current administration for problems with leachate collection at the former landfill. He said leachate was not pumped for 15 months from April 2020 to July 2021. He disagreed with the explanation that it stopped because only rainwater was being pumped, and that the solution was to raise the pumps. Said he, “Leachate is material suspended in water that eventually settles to the bottom of the tank. So what you want to do is you want to pump as close to the bottom as possible because the majority of leachate is down there. By raising the pumps up higher, now you’re insuring you’re getting more rainwater than leachate.”
Melinda McKnight
Melinda McKnight grew up in Port Ewen and says she is the 14th generation of her family to live in Ulster County. She spent two decades managing budgets for non-profits. She served as a grants reviewer for state and federal agencies. She was on the Ulster County tourism advisory board and was a Hurley representative on the Central Catskills Collaborative’s Route 28 state scenic byway project.
McKnight has an associate’s degree in journalism from SUNY Ulster, a bachelor’s degree in English from SUNY Albany and a master’s degree in public history from SUNY Albany. She is vice-president and CFO of the family-owned company Energy Conservation Services, a building performance contractor.
McKnight has lived in Hurley since 2007 and served on term on the town board in 2020 and 2021. She became Hurley’s first female supervisor in 2022.
“I feel the need to bring the town into compliance with state law, and we’ve made a lot of progress in the last 18 months or so. But there’s still a ways to go,” said McKnight.
She had to deal with DEC violations at the former landfill on her first day in office.
McKnight said she has been trying to reverse the consequences of previous administrations’ pledges to keep taxes low. She said that came at the cost of infrastructure and operations. “The metric that you use, is, you buy the least expensive thing, you make the least expensive repair, you measure everything based on the actual cost of the thing in front of you,” she said. “And without considering unintended consequences there.”
She pointed to a decision not to have the accountants in the payroll company keep track of accrued paid time off. “That decision meant that accrued time off had to still be accounted for by administrative staff. And it also meant that we were not in compliance with state law,” she said. “I’m convinced that once you add the administrative costs of the people having to manually track it, it would have probably been more cost effective to have just had company that we’re paying to do payroll, keep track of accrued time off.”
McKnight said drainage was one of the major challenges facing the town. “Every single complaint I get is about drainage issues,” she said. “Some of this is just a function of old subdivisions, and no requirements to plan for stormwater, and we’re playing some catch-up. But other areas, it’s related to lack of maintenance of drainage within the town rights-of-way. So that’s a gigantic challenge.”
Finding a permanent home for the town highway garage has been another contentious challenge. The town planner was recently contracted to do a location feasibility study of all the acreage the town owns. McKnight said she decided to go that route instead of hiring an engineer because a location needs to be chosen first prior to design work.
McKnight agreed the ongoing feuds between the highway superintendent and her administration were a challenge. “The fact of the matter is you have an independently elected official, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of a department who has now, you know, served for a few terms, and who seems to have had equally challenging relationships with each town board,” she said. “I’m not the only one to experience how challenging it is to deal with this particular set of personality issues. My tactic is always to do my best to remain who I am, to do my best to be the most emotionally mature person I can be, and to handle things that need to be handled in the manner in which they need to be handled, and to also understand that although I’m the supervisor I’m just one out of five town-board members. At the end of the day, I’m 20 percent of the vote.”
McKnight attributed the current rancor to ego.
“I don’t think in reality there’s so much divisiveness,” she said. “I believe in democracy. I’m happy to have people come voice their concerns. I’m happy to do what I can to try to find solutions and actually resolve the problems that we’re made aware of. Town boards are a little bit limited just because of how the laws are structured. There’s a lot of stuff that we don’t have any jurisdiction over.”
McKnight attributed a perceived lack of transparency to information not being available quickly enough.
In the first quarter of the year, much of that was attributed to the late clerk Judy Mayhon tending to her sick husband and then becoming ill herself.
“The other thing is that we’re transitioning from all of the bookkeeping happening at an outside vendor to a bookkeeper coming in-house,” she said. “And so obviously, that transition is a bit challenging, and has been a little more difficult than we initially thought would be the case. Sometimes folks assign negative motives. And I think it’s really more a function of you don’t get a book when you walk in here about how everything works, and where everything is. I walked in here and there was not a file in the file cabinet.”
With a new system in place that can text message town officials when there is a problem and a contract to pump the containment tanks, the leachate system at the former landfill seems to be under control for now.
But the system is sensitive to precipitation, McKnight said. “And because we’ve been in a drought, it’s been quite a while since we’ve had to pump. There’s nothing in the tanks,” she said.
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