Hurley has contracted with the accounting firm RBT to finish the annual financial review for 2023. Ulster town supervisor James Quigley, hired this spring to help the town, had other matters to attend to.
“I’ve spoken to the state comptroller’s office about this thing, and they understand our situation, and they’ve given us some time to get this thing done,” Hurley supervisor Mike Boms said at last week’s meeting of the town board. ““So we’re trying to get this thing done and get it straightened out, and then we’re going to work on 2022.”
Boms said the job wouldn’t be easy,
“What happened in 2022 and 2023 I can’t answer that,” he said. “I can’t answer that at all. All I know is that when I spoke to the state comptroller’s office about 2023, they told me that we had to redo the entire 2023 budget from January to December, and then once that is done, they want us to do the entire 2022 budget, because there’s also some complications there.”
Councilmember Gregory Simpson believes the problems go back further. “It’s very hard for me to accept or to understand that all of the problems that we’re dealing with now are a result of two years of activity. I mean, it’s just impossible. The level of work that Wendy [Trojak] and Jim [Quigley] have been doing, this is a systemic issue that dates back some time,” he said at the October 8 meeting.
Though councilmember Tim Kelly wasn’t sure where to assign blame, he noted that the town had stopped using its prior accounting firm midway through 2023. “The records were not being handled in a manner that goes with government accounting standards,” he said
Attorney Matt Jankowski cautioned the board to wait until an internal audit was complete before commenting on the circumstances.
Landfill remediation costs
The town board voted unanimously to authorize Boms to work with the state Environmental Facilities Corporation to apply for funding to remediate pollution at the town landfill. An engineering study to clean up PFOS found in the landfill costing an estimated $1,324,000 is expected to be covered by the grant.
“Once we get this approved for the $1.324 million, the cost of cleaning it up is around seven to eight million,” Boms said. That cost should also be covered by the grant. “My feeling is that if we get approval for the investigation, that follows next,” he said.
In October 2023, the state Department of Environmental Conservation declared the former town landfill a state Superfund site, making it eligible for remediation funding. The DEC detected perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) in several areas near the site, including in groundwater monitoring wells and private drinking water wells downhill from it.
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