BERNE — Berne Highway Superintendent Randy Bashwinger has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, owing nearly $15,000 to creditors who have taken legal action against him.

The costs are associated with his wife’s Stage 4 kidney disease, Bashwinger told The Enterprise on Tuesday, which he said has kept her out of work since 2019. 

“We fell behind on bills … Not something I’m proud of, but I don’t really have much choice,” Bashwinger said. 

Bashwinger earns $56,466 annually as Berne’s highway superintendent, a post to which he was elected in 2014.

He also works part-time for the county’s board of elections. When he took that job in 2019, it paid $20,736 a year, said Rachel Bledi, the Republican Commissioner at the Albany County Board of Elections, who hired Bashwinger.

Chapter 7 bankruptcy essentially allows individuals or entities to split their debts into six ranked categories, which must be paid in order of priority, according to the United States Courts website. 

“The individual debtor’s primary concerns in a chapter 7 case,” the site reads, “are to retain exempt property and to receive a discharge [from debt] that covers as many debts as possible.”

It goes on to explain that a discharge prevents creditors from taking legal action against the debtor.

Two Berne Democrats — Kevin Crosier, the party chairman, and Joel Willsey, the lone Democratic town board member — told The Enterprise about the bankruptcy.

At least four complaints have been filed against Bashwinger since late last year for debts he owes, according to publicly available court documents. 

Capital One Bank filed two complaints for a combined $7,775.31 owed. Debt collection agency Midland Credit Management, operating on behalf of Capital One and Comenity Capital Bank, filed two complaints for a combined $7,116.94 owed. Altogether, creditors are seeking to collect $14,892.25, according to documents obtained by The Enterprise.

Professional relevance

In addition to his position as town highway superintendent, which he has held since 2015, Bashwinger is chairman of the Albany County Republican Party. He was formerly chairman of the Berne Republican Party, bringing about the first GOP-backed board majority in the town in decades during the 2019 elections; the organization is now chaired by Lauren Miller. 

Bashwinger said that his bankruptcy doesn’t relate to his efficacy as highway superintendent, a position to which he’ll seek re-election in November, he said.

As highway superintendent, Bashwinger oversees a $1,137,417 component of the town budget. In a voicemail to The Enterprise and in a follow-up conversation, Bashwinger argued that he does not “make the [highway] budget.”

“I go in front of the [town] board, I have to get approval for the budget,” Bashwinger said. “They set the budget. I do not.”

Bashwinger is correct that the overall town budget is the domain of the town board, but the superintendent’s influence on it is not negligible. As he mentioned, the superintendent gives the highway budget its shape ahead of its review by the town board. 

Before the Berne Town Board flipped red in 2020 when GOP-backed board members Mathew Harris and Bonnie Conklin were sworn in — replacing Democrats Karen Schimmer and Dawn Jordan, who did not seek re-election, bringing the number of GOP-backed board members to four — Bashwinger often complained about being hemmed in by the board’s Democratic majority, which had denied him raises and opposed his plan to have highway crews work four 10-hour days each week instead of the traditional five eight-hour days, among other things.

While Bashwinger has portrayed himself as mostly helpless with the Democrats in control, he did manage to prevent an independent municipal consultant, Michael Richardson — authorized by the Democrats to review town spending and help Republican Supervisor Sean Lyons formulate a sharper budget for 2020 — from completing a review of highway department expenses.

Richardson told The Enterprise in 2019 that Bashwinger was supposed to provide cost-estimates within the highway department to Lyons, but that Bashwinger “didn’t even do that. He didn’t complete his statutory requirements.”

Richardson, then 67, said it was the only time he’d experienced resistance from a town that had contracted his services in the years he’d been a municipal consultant.

“It seems that Randy sees any constructive criticism of his department as a political move, which is ridiculous,” then-Councilwoman Jordan told The Enterprise in 2019.

Bashwinger denied in 2019 that he obstructed that process, calling the allegations “absolutely, 100-percent” a political attack.

The town is currently under audit by the New York State Comptroller’s office, possibly for reasons related to Bashwinger’s “statutory failings,” among other things.

Since Conklin and Harris took office in 2020 — although Harris has since resigned and been replaced by Republican Leo Vane — Bashwinger has had his procurement requests accepted more readily (though not without fail), and was granted a nearly 6-percent raise, bringing his salary to $56,466 this year.

Meanwhile, highway workers, through a new contract, were granted a 10-percent raise to be applied gradually until the end of 2022, as well as a longevity bonus that rewarded continuous employment. 

The contract also allows workers to operate on a four-day/40-hour schedule.

Enterprise calculations at the time indicated that the contract, approved last August, would cost the town an additional $28,587.60 over the three-year period that began retroactively upon its adoption.

This figure assumed that workers took full advantage of the reimbursement opportunities for safety eyewear and other materials. It also did not account for the death of longtime highway worker Peter Becker, who was killed on the job last October when a dump truck propped up on a pneumatic jack fell and crushed him; a subsequent investigation by the New York State Department of Labor’s Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau revealed seven “serious” safety violations related to the accident.

Notably, Conklin had voted against the new highway workers’ contract along with Democrat Joel Willsey, who has frequently clashed with Bashwinger over road safety and other issues, citing concerns about increased spending with the coronavirus pandemic still roaring.

And, at the town board’s 2020 reorganizational meeting, the board voted unanimously to authorize the highway superintendent to “spend up to $2,500 for purchase of tools, tires and equipment from New York State contract and/or the Albany County Purchasing Department; other County, State or Federal contracts without prior approval by the Town Board,” according to meeting minutes.

That authorization does not appear in the 2021 reorganizational meeting minutes. Lyons did not immediately respond to Enterprise questions about the change, nor about Bashwinger’s bankruptcy filing.

— Sean Mulkerrin contributed research on court documents.