HILLTOWNS — It’s been a year of big projects in little towns. 

Westerlo, Rensselaerville, and Knox have each begun or continued to work toward long-term initiatives that require them to stretch their normal capacities, and move beyond the subsistence mode that often dominates local government. 

Westerlo, where this progressive attitude seems to have taken root the earliest,  and the most deeply, is closing the loop on the roughly $1.7 million in federal funding it received to expand broadband, having recently awarded the project to Mid-Hudson Cable, with construction expected to begin next summer. 

Supervisor Matt Kryzak is also preparing a four-year capital-improvement plan that will invest $1.2 million from the town’s fund balance in infrastructure and facilities improvements. 

Knox and Rensselaerville have made their own progress on broadband this year, with their committees carrying out necessary preliminary work to later qualify for soon-to-be-available funding. This is on top of Knox planning a complete overhaul of its aged and decrepit transfer station, and Rensselaerville working on the same for its water system. 

The outlier in all this is Berne, which has been infamously colicky since the GOP took over the town board in 2020. Unlike the Republican-backed candidates that took over Rensselaerville and Westerlo around the same time, Berne’s GOP slates have come with an insatiable grievance against their Democratic predecessors. 

This grievance has played out in many different ways, but constitutes a mixed pattern of active self-defeat and lethargy that has placed the town on much less sure footing than its neighbors. 

The most major consequence of this is also potentially its most immediate: a lawsuit from former Democratic Supervisor Kevin Crosier, who was forcibly removed from a public hearing in February on an ATV law that was so controversial it would still have top billing in this year-in-review even if not for the potential civil rights violation that ensued. 

This year was also of course a major election year with town board seats up for grabs in each of the towns, in addition to highway superintendents, clerks, and justices. Although there were ultimately  no meaningful shifts in power, the cycle still contained many surprises. 

 

Broadband

The shared burden of all the Hilltowns right now is broadband. Each town has a large number of households that don’t have a stable internet connection, and the means of achieving one are cost-prohibitive for both individuals and the governments they turn to for help. 

Laying down infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and there’s no real incentive for internet service providers to take on this cost when low population density means fewer people will subscribe to their services. Compounding this problem is that many in the Hilltowns already can’t afford the cost of internet service, whether it be broadband or one of the less-reliable alternatives like satellite or cellular. 

Starlink — the satellite internet network created by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — has been reported as more reliable than other satellite services, and could for some put the broadband issue out of mind, but signing up is expensive. It would cost more than $668 to sign up for service in Rensselaerville today, including the $90 per month subscription fee. It’s unclear whether that monthly fee would increase, since the company advertises a base monthly fee of $120 for most locations. 

Westerlo has been the gold standard among the Hilltowns for broadband efforts, having managed to get nearly $1.7 million in federal funds with the help of Congressman Paul Tonko. The town’s broadband committee, led by former planning board chairwoman Dorothy Verch, had compiled maps and reams of research to present Tonko with a solid plan for how it would use the money, and why it was so necessary. 

The Hilltowns had benefited from high-speed internet grants in the past, but only passively, through state funds awarded to private companies, such as in 2018 when Hudson Valley Wireless was able to expand services to several Hilltown homes.

But the pandemic made clear that reliable internet was a necessity for modern living. 

This year, Knox hosted a focus group about internet access in the town in partnership with the not-for-profit organization CanCode. More than two dozen residents turned up, and shared how poor service had affected them. 

One resident said that spotty connections get in the way of his telehealth appointments. 

“If they want to look at our mole, they can’t, because the signal drops out,” he said.

One Berne-Knox-Westerlo teacher in attendance said that he has to wait until he’s at school to use the internet, which gets in the way of interacting with students, who now are free to send emails about homework at any hour — assuming they have internet, which many don’t, as The Enterprise had previously reported. 

The town’s broadband committee put together a list of households that need service, which is a more difficult task than it might sound. More generalized maps have been created by larger agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, which creates the map that lawmakers use when allocating funds, but many of these are inaccurate, and overestimate the availability of service. 

The FCC map in particular is flawed because it focuses on service at the census-block level, meaning that a few people having service in an area means that the whole area is considered covered. This leaves the Hilltowns in a bad position, because last-mile coverage is often the most expensive. Many have complained that they can see where broadband lines end from their homes, but can’t get connected. 

Rensselaerville, too, has figured out the extent of its need, estimating that half of households in the town don’t have broadband, as committee member Hans Soderquist reported to the board this month. 

As Westerlo did, towns will have to do the legwork to prove that they need the money that’s becoming available at the state and county levels, and that they have a reliable plan to use it. 

“We will continue to advocate for continued resourcing for this town because you’re already organized,” CanCode founder Chief Executive Officer Annmarie Lanesey told Knox residents at the focus meeting this year. “And that’s a huge, huge advantage over many other places … It will be a much easier project to get this community connected than it would be in some other places where there’s not already organization.”

Even then, the wait will likely be long. Westerlo expects construction of broadband infrastructure to begin in the summer of 2024 — three years after meeting with Tonko to get his support, research in hand. 

 

Big projects

These three towns have also taken on large projects of repair and improvement, with price tags that are a sizable portion of their typical annual budgets. 

Some of these, admittedly, were a forced hand. 

The foundation of Knox’s two-tier transfer station was determined to be in a state of failure by Nolan Engineering, making urgent a problem that had been pointed out years earlier. 

The firm recommended, based on the severity of the defects, that the whole thing be demolished and rebuilt. Early on, the board spoke of the project as a potential seven-figure expense, but this year managed to come up with a plan that should keep it below the million-dollar mark. 

As residents used an ad-hoc transfer station system made up of a job trailer and two Dumpsters, the board — through some difficulty — devised a fairly simple redesign that will allow them to avoid excavation costs and expensive foundation work. 

“We decided to abandon the hopper and pit concept in favor of an Alaskan slab, which would be poured over the site of the existing pit,” Supervisor Russ Pokorny told The Enterprise in an email this year. “The Alaskan slab would have a 40 foot by 48 foot pavilion built over it that would house the two mobile compactor units we are now using for solid waste. These two units would be redeployed for cardboard and commingled recyclables.”

Although not a complete nor formal quote, one contractor estimated construction would cost $228,000, Pokorny had said at a meeting. 

So long as that quote was well-estimated and non-construction costs aren’t too much more, the town could cover the project with the $272,000 it had received in federal funding to ease the burdens of the pandemic. 

Rensselaerville is not expecting to have that same luck with its water system, which is in need of an overhaul after multiple water-quality violations, among other problems. 

Although the water is safe to drink, there have been high levels of total trihalomethanes (TTHM) and haloacetic acid 5 (HAA5), violating federal quality standards and requiring the town to put a notice out to residents advising them of the issue. 

The Rensselaerville water district gets its water from Lake Myosotis, which, as a body of surface water, is exposed to more environmental contaminants than water from an aquifer would be, and so requires more treatment. That makes things difficult, but the fundamental problem is that the system itself dates back to the 1940s, and is simply too old for what’s demanded of it. 

The Rensselaerville Water and Sewer Advisory Committee, now led by Ed Csukas, has been working hard to identify funding sources and, most recently, recommended that the town work with the engineering firm C.T. Male to draw up design plans. Just as a scope of the problem and a plan of attack are critical for broadband funding, the same is true for getting the increasing amounts of grant money being dedicated toward infrastructure. 

That funding will be essential, since the project will almost certainly cost more than a million dollars — and possibly quite a bit more.

“Whether this project is going to be $1,000,000 [or] $2,000,000, I have no idea at this point,” Csukas told the board this month. 

All that matters right now is that the town does everything it can to get what’s available, because the opportunities that exist now with post-pandemic funding might not last. 

“Really, what we’re looking at right now is if we don’t take advantage of the funding that’s currently available and it goes away, a small town like ours will never be able to afford an upgrade,” Csukas said. 

In Westerlo, the town’s biggest project is just getting started, with Supervisor Matt Kryzak expecting to roll out his $1.2 million capital improvement plan early next year. 

The goal of this plan is to fight rural decay — which Kryzak has brought up several times over the years as an area of focus, and was a theme in the town’s comprehensive plan — and make sure that town property is an “asset, not a liability.”

This spending will be allowed by cautious budgeting done by both Kryzak, a Republican, and his predecessor, Democrat Bill Bichteman, who took office as acting supervisor in 2019 and resigned in 2021. 

As of November, the town had around $2.4 million in its fund balance, which is up from $736,000 in 2019. 

The town is also facing its own long-standing water-quality issues, with Kryzak reporting this month that he has been in contact with state Senator Neil Breslin’s office about funding to treat bromomethane that is in the town’s water. 

 

Troubles

Of course, not all has been copacetic on the Hill, even where progress has been steady. 

Aside from Berne, Westerlo, for all its achievements, has been the most politically contentious, with residents and some board members rallying against a variety of things, including having George McHugh serve as the town’s attorney, the town’s planned transfer of land to the local volunteer fire department, and broader complaints about transparency. (The Enterprise has not discovered any information that warrants objective concern in any of these areas, however.) 

McHugh, who has drawn heat in the region more widely as the recently ousted supervisor of Coeymans, was criticized in Westerlo for not being present enough for how much the town was paying him, and for potentially having conflicts of interest owing to his position in Coeymans, as well as the counsel he provides to other entities, like the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. 

When Kryzak introduced a law that would formalize the town’s practice of hiring non-residents to certain positions, including the town attorney, some residents felt it was an underhanded favor to McHugh by making him eligible for employee benefits. 

McHugh had declined to comment on residents’ criticisms after a hearing on that law where he was the focus, but Kryzak stood firmly behind McHugh, praising him as a top-tier attorney who was being unfairly targeted in an election year.

On cost, Kryzak has maintained that McHugh, who earns a flat rate, costs less than the town’s previous attorney, Knox resident Javid Afzali, who was paid an hourly rate that exceeded budget predictions. 

“With as much legal work as we’ve needed done with the new [comprehensive] plan and all the zoning work that we’re doing right now with the three renewable energy laws — the solar, battery storage, and wind energy — we’ve gone over budget with legal fees on an hourly basis,” Kryzak had told The Enterprise after McHugh was selected as the town’s attorney in 2021. 

The residency law — which, were it not a proxy for concerns about McHugh, likely would have been a fairly mundane policy adoption — ultimately passed 3-to-2, with councilmen Joshua Beers and Peter Mahan voting against it. 

The proposed transfer of three acres of town land to the local fire department so it can build a new fire station also was, on its face, a probable slam dunk for the town board, but the town’s planning board issued a letter expressing concern that the process would go against the town’s zoning law. 

Kryzak said that, although the town is exempt from its own zoning, he would still make sure that the planning board would get to have a say in things. Both Kryzak and planning board chairman, Beau Loendorf, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for town board this year, accused each other of political motivations in the debate, which largely took place before the November election. 

“Since it’s an election year everyone feels the need to politicize everything, just like they did with the town attorney and all the other things that have been used as a talking point for people running for office,” Kryzak said. 

Loendorf said that his request was not political, and that he was simply trying to get information, while feeling like it’s being withheld. 

“It’s 100 percent political for them to try to steal a win for this upcoming election, unfortunately,” Loendorf said. “Otherwise, we would have had more open conversations, and more studies to ensure this is the best decision.”

Fire Chief Andrew Joslin told The Enterprise that he isn’t concerned so much about how the transfer is handled, but that it gets done so the company can get moving on a new station. 

“We’ve been working on identifying a new space for the station for years,” Joslin said. “Having the opportunity to finally have a piece of property for it is exciting.”

The difficulty, he said, has been meeting the station’s various needs, like water, while staying close enough to the center of town that fire insurance rates don’t go up. 

“There’s been a number of issues,” he said of other properties. “Some property was just too far out of range and would affect the [Insurance Service Offices] rating, so those are the challenges we’ve been struggling with.”

While Westerlo’s disagreements have all come down to philosophical differences or, at times, legal misunderstandings, Berne has had more worrisome problems — legal, financial, and ethical.

Toward the end of the meeting that Kevin Crosier had been forcibly removed from, Supervisor Dennis Palow all but admitted that the removal was payback for something similar Crosier had allegedly done as supervisor before he left office at the end of  2017. Deputy Supervisor Anita Clayton said at the same time that the removal was “prejudiced.” 

Crosier’s suit asks for at least $100,000 in damages. This would hit the town where it hurts, as money has become tight with the town’s fund balance now nearly depleted. 

The Republican-backed board claimed in a letter justifying the town’s seven-fold tax increase that the deep tax cuts from the past two years were meant to be relief for residents affected by the COVID-19 pandemic — a claim former Democratic Councilman Joel Willsey, who was on the board when those budgets were created, finds dubious. 

“I don't recall any discussion of the 87% tax reduction being intended as covid relief,” Willsey told The Enterprise in a text. The Enterprise has not quoted any officials describing the tax cuts as a temporary relief.  

During a 2021 meeting where Willsey was questioning the wisdom of such a steep tax cut, Palow, then the deputy supervisor, responded that residents “have been overtaxed for the last 15 years,” referring to a period when the town had been under Crosier’s leadership.

Willsey, who did not seek re-election in 2021, accused the board of cutting taxes to bolster their chances in that year’s heated general election. 

The pandemic in New York state began in 2020, which is when the widespread closure of schools and businesses were instituted; the tax cuts in Berne came in 2022 and 2023 when federal pandemic aid was flowing.

Crosier and the Democratic administration before his, headed by Alan Zuk, had built up a large rainy-day account for the town. 

The 2024 tax rate of $4.61 puts taxes back around where they were in 2016, the year before the GOP started making its inroads on the board. 

If there’s been a victory for Berne this year, it’s the impending sale of Switzkill Farm to Albany County. However, a study of the movements toward the final agreement suggest that this was an accomplishment the town got in spite of itself. 

 Negotiations with the county were announced early last year, with Palow saying that the county was interested in a partnership with Berne, where the property would remain under the town’s ownership but the county would contribute funding for “anything that needs to be done up there.”

The property had been languishing since the GOP took control of the town board and disbanded the committee that oversaw it. Those board members and their supporters felt the 358-acre property — which was purchased in 2014 with the town spending under $150,000 — was too much a burden on taxpayers, while champions of the property argued that it had intangible value that made up for costs to begin with, while also still holding potential to make money back as an event space. 

The board had made several attempts to rid itself of the property, first by announcing its own vulnerability to a lawsuit (later filed and ultimately dropped by board ally Tom Spargo, a former state Supreme Court Justice convicted of a felony), and then by exploring the legally challenging path for a private sale. 

A partnership with the county, therefore, was welcome news to all, since it would mean the cost of owning the property would be eased without sacrificing its accessibility to residents. 

But, after the county offered $150,000 for the property, it learned just how poorly it had been maintained and withdrew the offer, causing Palow to falsely claim that the county withdrew because it “had no money” and wanted to negotiate with a Democratic board. (The majority-Democratic county is led by Democratic County Executive Daniel McCoy, who had had a close working relationship with Crosier when he was supervisor.) 

What Palow left out was that, after withdrawing the offer, the county had followed up with a new offer to invest in stabilizing the property until it was ready to resume talks. The town never responded to that offer, and The Enterprise didn’t learn about it until a building on the property collapsed late last year. 

Shortly after The Enterprise published an article on the town’s role in tanking negotiations, Clayton announced that talks had resumed, and the county legislature authorized McCoy to purchase the property for $150,000. 

“It is unfortunate that the condition of the Lodge and the other farm’s  buildings have been allowed to deteriorate over the past four years, but I’m optimistic that will now change under the County’s purview, and it will become the asset it was intended to be,” former Democratic Town Councilwoman Karen Schimmer, who was on the board when the town bought the property, told The Enterprise after the announcement.

“We’ve just got to stop the damage to preserve it for the future, not just for residents of the county, but hopefully for the visitors that we’ll have come here and utilize this beautiful piece of property,” McCoy told The Enterprise.

 

Election

Although elections this year have hardly changed the makeup of the town boards, and have done nothing to alter the power dynamics, they were still notable in the months leading up to Election Day itself. 

For all of Berne’s troubles, the local Democratic committee opted not to capitalize on any frustration that may have been building in voters, letting the two GOP-backed town board candidates — incumbent Al Thiem and planning board chairman Joe Martin — run uncontested. 

“It is not possible to make changes by running candidates this November with the limited Town Board seats that are available,” the committee wrote in a statement. “This is because this board has disregarded town code, state law, improperly managed town finances as certified by the Comptroller of NY, and has taken constitutional protections away from every citizen of Berne — all by showing that they will not work together for the betterment of the town and follow the law.”

Party Chairman Jeff Marden denied that the decision was influenced by the Democrats’ resounding defeat at the hands of Republicans in 2021, and said that the Democratic committee doesn’t see any flaw in the logic that betting on all three potential candidates winning in 2025 makes it harder to get a majority than splitting the quest for three board seats across two elections. Town board members in Berne sit for four years each. 

“We are waiting until that election because even if we won both seats this year, we would only have a small minority,” the email said.

“That small minority,” the email went on, “combined with this board’s unwillingness to work together, which we all have seen in previous terms, told us that we would not be empowered to be productive in any way. We would be barred from proposing and passing any motions, having any budgetary impact, or even at the minimum being recognized to speak by the supervisor during meetings.

“Additionally, in that extreme minority, we would be unable to stop the illegal, unethical, and hurtful actions that we’ve seen members of this board take in the past,” the email said.

Many residents were unhappy with this decision, saying that it revealed a “total lack of political smarts,” as resident Mary Ann Ronconi put it in a letter to the Enterprise editor. 

“After the ATV fiasco this past winter when Berne residents in large numbers spoke out against the intentions of the town board and saw how offensive the town supervisor can be, I thought the Berne Democratic Committee was presented with a golden opportunity to take open seats in town government this November,” she had written.

On the other end of the spectrum, Westerlo, owing to the tensions described above, saw a very heated election cycle, with three board seats open including the supervisor’s position. 

Kryzak, on the Republican and Conservative lines, was re-elected to a four-year term with 398 votes — or 41 percent of votes — despite challenges from body-shop owner Donald Morin, getting 307 — 32 percent — of votes on the Democratic line, and Angela Carkner getting 261 votes — 27 percent — on the Spend Less Party line.

Town board member Amie Burnside, on the Republican and Conservative lines, was re-elected with 457 votes — 26 percent — in a four-way race for two seats, while board member Peter Mahan, on the Democratic and Spend Less Party lines, was re-elected with 489 votes — 28 percent. 

Their challengers were planning board Chairman Beau Loendorf, who got 378 votes — 22 percent — on the Democratic line, and farmer and music teacher William Hall, who got 409 votes — 24 percent — on the Republican line.  

While a contest is the expectation when a board majority is up for grabs, Westerlo’s revealed some surprising intraparty fault lines. 

Kryzak and Mahan were elected together as part of the same GOP slate in 2021, but have been at odds over various things — particularly spending, hence Mahan’s association with the Spend Less Party. As a result of these disagreements, Mahan was also unable to get a Republican nod, siding instead with the Democrats. 

Meanwhile, Democrats (or, more precisely, the anti-Kryzak voters) were seemingly split between Carkner and Morin, with Morin getting the party’s endorsement and not too many more votes in the election over Carkner. The gap between those two was around 50 votes, while the gap between Morin and Kryzak was around 90. 

The issues that dominated the election were those described above, with Carkner, Loendorf, Morin, and Mahan taking shots at town leadership in campaign interviews, to varying degrees. 

Ultimately, though, only Mahan was chosen by enough voters to remain as a squeaky wheel for the next four years. 

Things were far less dramatic in Rensselaerville, but with its first contested races since 2017, it was technically the most exciting election for residents in a long while. 

Incumbent town board member Brian Wood kept his seat and former highway superintendent Randall Bates joined the board, beating out Patricia Byrnes, a sociologist. 

Wood and Bates got 466 and 304 votes respectively for two town board seats, to Byrnes’ 227 — a 47-30-22 split, with just two write-ins. Wood was endorsed by the Democratic and Conservative parties, while Bates was endorsed by the Republican and Conservative parties, and Byrnes was endorsed by the Democratic Party.

“What I would have brought to the residents (of all parties) of Rensselaerville Town will never see the light of day under Randy Bates,” Byrnes wrote in an email to The Enterprise on Election Night. “A great loss for women, families, and youth (rising new voters) and how they are represented. I will be analyzing how it is, in the 21st century, that a town board can be exclusively male.”

Bates told The Enterprise in a campaign interview that he ran because he “continue[s] to have interest in the town, and I have a lot of experience.” 

One issue he felt strongly about back when he was with the highway department, and which was highlighted with the recent flooding that closed a town road last month, is the state of the town’s infrastructure.

“We use the term ‘hardening the infrastructure,’” he said of the concept of reinforcing things like roads and so on, “and I think instead of hardening, I think we need to reimagine it.”

The justice race — between incumbent Democrat Gregory Bischoff and Republican Richard Tollner — was at first too close to call, but Bischoff won by just nine votes. 

“It’s nice to see people are interested; it’s just that you’d like to see more than one third of eligible voters voting,” Bischoff said.

Tollner — who had accepted Bischoff’s win early on, but was at the mercy of the county board of elections as it went through its own process to determine the race — told The Enterprise last month that he was grateful for the voters who turned out and said he was “looking forward to the next go-around.”