Pecylak beats Brush for Westerlo highway super

WESTERLO — By a wide margin, Westerlo voters affirmed Westerlo Acting Highway Superintendent Dave Pecylak as their pick to run the town’s highway department, according to the Albany County Board of Elections’s unofficial results. 

Pecylak, who has been with the town for eight years before he stepped up to acting highway superintendent after Jody Ostrander retired, was challenged by James Brush, whose background was in the private sector. Both men brought decades of highway experience to their campaigns. 

Pecylak received 1,098 to Brush’s 706, making for a 61-39 split. 

Pecylak told The Enterprise last month in a candidate interview that he doesn’t plan to make any major overhauls to the department, opting instead to improve operations on the margins and focusing on replacing aging equipment and cleaning up the garage. 

“There’s a lot of stuff sitting around and I just wanted to clean it up, get rid of stuff,” he said. “We get a lot of parts and stuff that we don’t have the trucks for anymore.” 

More Hilltowns News

  • After raising taxes more than 750 percent for this year’s budget, Berne Supervisor Dennis Palow — who lacks a town board after a majority of members resigned over financial and other concerns — is proposing raising taxes 19 percent to roughly $5.49 per $1,000 in assessed value, which would be the highest tax rate in more than a decade.

  • Berne Supervisor Dennis Palow made the rare decision to speak with The Enterprise this week, offering his side of two allegations that have defined the town for at least the past few months: that he has allowed the town to drift into financial ruin, and that he meanwhile had created such a hostile work environment that three of his fellow Republican-backed town board members resigned.

  • It’s been two-and-a-half months since three of the Berne Town Board’s five members resigned suddenly over concerns about the town’s supervisor, Dennis Palow, yet there’s been no meaningful updates about when the board will resume functioning, even as time runs out on the year’s budget cycle. 

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