Hurley is studying two sites for a new highway garage and possibly a town hall.
One site is on an access road up a hill just past the transfer station off Dug Hill Road where brush is stored. That site, on part of 88 acres of town-owned property designated as parkland, would require an act of the state legislature to alienate it from park designation.
Town supervisor Mike Boms said a second site north and west of the first site identified by town engineer Dennis Larios was viable, pending test drilling and archeological screening.
“There are no artifacts here all the way through. The artifacts are further up,” Boms said at a March 12 meeting where the options were explained.
“This is a solid piece of land, and not very hilly. And so this is where we propose about five to seven acres right along here, where we propose to put the garage here, and hopefully we’ll plan on also possibly putting the town hall there,” Boms said. “At town hall, we’re bursting at the seams. We are actually encroaching on the court right now putting offices in there. We have grown. The building has not.”
Hurley is leasing a garage on Basin Road in the Town of Kingston, where it pays $74,000 to $84,000 per year. It has one more year on its lease, with an option for a final year.
Each year, the lease costs $4000 to $5000 more, Boms said. “So in the three years that we will be there, that’s a quarter-million dollars that we’ve spent there.”
The previous town board condemned the old highway garage on Dug Hill Road in December 2022 after an engineering report declared it unsafe.
Some, including former deputy supervisor Peter Humphries, have questioned why the town can’t build a new garage on the footprint of the former one. “That will cost our taxpayers millions of dollars less than moving it up on top of that hill on solid rock,” Humphries said.
Boms said the former garage is adjacent to the former landfill recently declared a state Superfund site.
“We asked the DEC if that’s possible to do that kind of thing, and they said not at this point right now unless we clean out the area,” Boms reported.
That wasn’t a real option, said councilmember Gregory Simpson. The cleanup would cost much more than the cost of relocation.
Highway superintendent Mike Shultis agreed. The cleanup cost would be astronomical, “and then you don’t even know what you’re going to have in the groundwater,” Shultis said.
Resident Tobe Carey asked why not build the garage on the original site since it has to be cleaned up anyway.
An April 2023 site survey conducted by archeologist David Johnson identified nearly 20 stones and other features of significance and marked them on a map. Johnson, an archeological advisor for the Ramapough Lenape Nation, has researched Native American sacred and ceremonial stones throughout North America.
One stone resembles a turtle’s head. Another series of stones resembles a snake with a larger stone as its head.
Boms insisted none of the finds were in the areas proposed as the building site.
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