WESTERLO — As Westerlo’s town employees move to unionize through the United Public Service Employees Union, Town Supervisor Matt Kryzak has given his tacit approval, but said he’s creating some resistance on behalf of the taxpayers so that future collective bargaining efforts don’t put the town in a bad position.

UPSEU labor relations representative Rob Lamoureux, however, suggested to The Enterprise this week that the resistance is more akin to obstruction, claiming that the town has not provided any of the information that the union has asked for on three different occasions.

Kryzak denied this, saying the town “provided all of the requested information to him to provide to all parties concerned,” and that he would check with the labor relations attorney for more information.

Lamoureux told The Enterprise that the union — which is expected to cover between 15 and 20 town employees — is seeking the “names and salaries of the persons holding the titles proposed to be covered in the bargaining unit,” their job descriptions, and “a number of documents” that would play a role in bargaining, from employee benefit information, to other contracts the town may have with other unions, and town budgets.

“These requests were emailed to both the Supervisor and the Town’s attorney in early October, and sent via registered mail to both parties later that month,” Lamoureux wrote in an email to The Enterprise. “Neither the Supervisor nor the Town’s attorney acknowledged, nor responded to, either request. The Union is still waiting to receive all of the above."

Kryzak told The Enterprise after this article was first published that the town’s attorney sent “hundreds of pages of documents that had to be reproduced and cataloged” directly to the administrative law judge overseeing the process.

Prior to The Enterprise hearing from Lamoureux about the holdup, Kryzak told the newspaper that he is broadly in favor of the town’s employees unionizing, but did not agree to immediately recognize the union in an effort to protect taxpayers. 

“I’m not anti-union,” Kryzak said. “I’m definitely pro-union. However … I didn’t want to just sign on a dotted line to get our members represented. I wanted our members to do the legwork, and the union to do the legwork with [the Public Employment Relations Board] to have the union recognized.”

Kryzak had announced in May that he received a letter from UPSEU about the intent to unionize, and since then the process has moved slowly as the parties undergo a discovery process — getting all the facts on who’s paid what and setting the table for negotiations.

Kryzak said that the unionization will definitely cost the town more money, but it won’t be clear how much until negotiations begin. The union will encompass all town employees.

The information that’s currently getting collected, Kryzak said, will go before an administrative law judge who will essentially rule if there’s “enough evidence here that [employees] want to be represented by UPSEU and they’ll grant that, then we can sign … and we can go to negotiations.” 

The town is being represented by Brian Kremer, of Goldberger and Kremer, who specializes in public employee unions. 

Kryzak said he’s familiar with union relationships through his family’s contracting business, though he acknowledged that public and private unions can operate fairly differently. 

“In the private sector, it really does behoove the union to let the employers know what benefits they can have for both the employee and the employer,” he said; Kryzak gave as an example training funds that unions his family’s business deals with have.

“That’s a huge benefit to us being unionized because they’re basically always training our employees,” Kryzak said. 

He said he doesn’t think municipal unions have “anything they bring to the table for the municipality or the taxpayers. It’s simply for the employee, so it’s a very different relationship.” 

Westerlo employees already receive regular raises, and the town is paying them all as much as it can afford, Kryzak said. In the 2025 budget, all town employees received at least 4-percent raises, with the highway employees getting 6-percent.

The 4-percent baseline was on the advice of the town’s labor relations attorney, who had told Kryzak — after Kryzak suggested a 3-percent raise — that 4-percent was the average in most other towns. 

While Kryzak said that the town has given out raises every year, on top of good benefits, a union will give employees a guarantee of a raise every single year no matter who’s in office, plus better protections than what’s currently in the town handbook, which Kryzak said he’s basically in favor of as long as the town can afford it. 

“It’s just that that’s going to be a process that we’re going to have to go through,” he said.