Hurley town-supervisor-elect Mike Boms doesn’t lack for ambition. He has six big goals he wants to tackle in his first year.
“Once I’m supervisor, I will then bring it to the board, get their recommendation, get their approval, and then go,” Boms said. “There are six things going in six different directions. Go. Go for it, and let’s do it”
Dealing with the contamination caused by improperly maintained leachate containment systems over the 40 years at the old Hurley landfill has been in existence is his top priority for 2024.
“The number-one goal is take care of the leachate field. Find out what’s going on, what needs to be done, and who’s going to be financially responsible for it,” Boms said. “Will it be the town or the will it be the DEC? And we’ll go from there.”
Recently, the state Department of Environmental Conservation declared the landfill a Superfund site. Superfund status may give the town access to up to a million dollars in cleanup funding.
Getting the water situation in West Hurley under control is his second big priority. Some sections of West Hurley in the area of Hurley Ridge are serviced by a private water provider, Hudson Valley Water Company, run by Jeff Fuller, based on Long Island. Residents have been dealing with outages, billing problems and other failures for decades. Residents say Fuller has done little to help during outages.
The town is powerless to do anything aside from purchasing the infrastructure, upgrading it, and establishing a municipal water district.
“It’s an interesting habit in West Hurley. Every time around Christmastime, for the past four years there’s an outage,” Boms said. “I know, for example, when you lose power for a long period of time, Central Hudson comes around with water, they come around with ice.”
Boms predicted upcoming negotiations with Fuller. State and federal grants may be available to update the infrastructure once the areas serviced by the water company become town water districts.
“We’re going to settle this. It’s not going to be pushed two or three years down the road,” Boms said. “If we have to buy the water company, sue the water company or do something, we will get our hands on that water company and we will try to upgrade it to a modern system.”
Boms’ third goal is an update of the zoning code.
“We’ll have a committee of the planning board chairperson, zoning board chairperson, building inspector, and a land-use lawyer. We’ll go through the zoning codes to see exactly what could be tweaked, changed, added, deleted, to modernize it,” he said. “The entire code is antiquated. If I’m not mistaken, it was actually done somewhere in the 1980s.”
Part of that process is to restart the comprehensive plan committee where it left off in 2021, he said.
As a fourth goal, Boms would like to start a recreation program for summer programs, men’s and women’s softball leagues, and Little-League baseball.
Drainage is a big issue in Hurley. Dealing with it is goal number five.
The sixth goal — and it’s a big one — is finding a site for and breaking ground on a new highway garage.
“I want to hopefully get a shovel in the ground in the spring,” Boms said.
Work can’t start on achieving these ambitious goals until Boms begins his town supervisor term in January, but he said he’s already has people in place to get the ball rolling.
“Some people say that’s a lot to do, but I’ve already talked to people about joining committees to do these things.”
Come January, there will be two vacancies on the town board. One seat is now open due to the resignation of council member Jana Martin. When Boms is sworn in as supervisor, his own town-board seat becomes vacant. Boms hopes both his seat and Martin’s seat will be kept vacant until January.
“The seat that Jana Martin left should also be filled by the next board since we’re going to be dealing with it,” Boms said. “So I would be very, very upset if there’s an attempt to have that seat seated before the new administration comes in.”
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