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

  • Albany County, in one of its first acts as owner of the property, has fixed up the road leading up to Switzkill Farm as it prepares for more improvements down the line. 

  • The Berne-Knox-Westerlo Board of Education unanimously adopted Superintendent Bonnie Kane’s $24.7 million budget for the 2025-26 school year, which will go to a public vote on May 20. 

  • Although an old agreement is still in place and would remain so indefinitely, the town of Berne is considering signing a new contract with the cable company, Spectrum, that would keep the franchise fee the town receives from the company the same but would remove an obligation for Spectrum to build new infrastructure in areas that meet a household-density threshold. 

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