Hurley’s town board has voted unanimously to appoint former supervisor John Perry as deputy supervisor for two years with an annual $2500 stipend. The deputy supervisor sits at the town-board table during meetings and participates in the discussions, but is a non-voting member. He runs meetings in the absence of the supervisor.
The town board also unanimously appointed Perry part-time recreation director at $15 per hour, with a maximum of ten hours per week.
The town-board meeting last week also discussed progress on three chronic issues: the two water districts in West Hurley owned by the Hudson Valley Water Company, the case for lowering the speed limit on Zandhoek Road, and the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency’s willingness to pump leachate from the holding tanks at the former Hurley landfill.
West Hurley water districts
Hurley town officials expect to begin talks with the owner of the troubled Hudson Valley Water Company to purchase and run two private water districts in West Hurley.
“The people in West Hurley complained to the Public Service Commission,” Hurley town supervisor Mike Boms said. “We wrote a letter to the Public Service Commission. The county wrote a letter to the Public Service Commission. And he was then rebuffed and only given a three percent rate increase, which is lower than inflation.”
According to the PSC, the two districts were valued at $78,000, which Boms called “doable.” The water company’s customers have been complaining for years about frequent outages, water so caustic it eats through their plumbing, constant billing problems, and other issues.
The town board voted unanimously at its January 23 meeting to authorize Boms to negotiate a sale price with Fuller.
Zandhoek speed limit
After a recent fatal accident and some close calls, the town board voted to request the state Department of Transportation to reduce the speed on Zandhoek Road from 35 m.p.h. to 30 m.p.h.
But an increasingly impatient Boms said more needs to be done. He said the county installed a new stop sign, but that’s not where the main problem is.
“There have been ten accidents this year alone on that portion of Zandhoek and they had nothing to do with the intersection at all,” Boms said. “It’s all in the middle. I spoke to one woman who was walking on the sidewalk on Zandhoek right by that hook there, and a car is going east and cars coming west. And she’s standing going, Like, what do I do? She knew right away that she had two choices, get hit by the side-view mirror, or jump in the ditch and possibly drown.”
The past response from officials has been to do a study, he said, but that wasn’t enough.
“I don’t like studies at all because it just pushes things down the road. I want to see action. They then said the study will last 30 days. It is now 26 days left,” he said. “What I feel that the county has done is very minimal. They’re trying to placate the residents.”
County legislator Eric Stewart, who represents Hurley and parts of Marbletown, said he had arranged a meeting with deputy county executive Amanda LaValle, county planning director Dennis Doyle and other officials to deal with Zandhoek Road, Main Street and Schoolhouse Road.
“We are investigating, dealing with the ditches on Zandhoek Road, putting in culverts, and covering at least one side of that with a walking path or a trail,” Stewart said. “We’re also looking at crosswalks. We’re looking at reducing speeds. We’re looking at posting additional signage.”
The situation was “something that we are very cognizant of both on the local level as well as on the county level.”
Pumping leachate
The Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency is now able to pump leachate from the holding tanks at the former Hurley landfill at a cost of $285 per pumping. This will save the town a considerable amount of money over the services previously provided by a private contractor at $1000 per pumping. Pumping expenses amounted to nearly $40,000 for the month of December, Boms said.
“One of the reasons why UCRRA was not chosen prior is that they do not do leachate pulls on the weekends. Well, I found that that they do,” Boms said. “I don’t know where they said they can’t do pulls on weekends. But they already did a pull on the weekend. They actually came here on Martin Luther King’s birthday, on the 15th, a federal holiday, and they did a pull. They have said that on Saturday they have staff in there, and if we need to, they would come. And they also said that on Sunday they would come. So far, they have done five pulls, which would have cost us $5000, which is now costing us $1000.”
Previous town supervisor Melinda McKnight chose a private contractor because of the vendor’s availability on short notice, and justified it as avoiding state violations resulting from holding tanks overflowing into the ground and nearby wells.
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