BERNE — Town residents this November will face the same decision they faced last November — who will become the new highway superintendent. Only the choices have changed.

Less than a year after being re-elected to a four-year term, Kenneth Weaver resigned from the position, citing tensions with the town board.

“I’m just tired of playing games,” said Weaver.

Edward J. Hampton was planning on retiring from his job as an equipment operator at the town highway department soon, but he has decided to try working as a superintendent for the next three years. He will face Randy Bashwinger, a project manager and longtime building materials salesman, to fill the remaining term left by Weaver, Hampton’s childhood friend.

Hampton, 60, is running on the Democratic line, and Bashwinger, 43, is backed by Republicans, according to the party committee chairs.

Weaver, previously a Democratic candidate and the pride of the GOP candidates in the 2013 election, worried on Election Night that tensions with the town board might come with his victory and said Wednesday they caused him to step down last month.

“I was elected to be the highway superintendent, to make decisions that I felt made sense, and it wasn’t up to the town board or the supervisor to supercede me,” Weaver said, referring to the board’s August vote to have the town supervisor seek contractors for road work done by other local highway departments over the summer.

Supervisor Kevin Crosier insisted, despite his criticisms of Weaver’s work and tardiness, that Weaver had been treated fairly and pointed to the town board’s authorization of large purchases of equipment for the department over the last year.

“The election’s over and we get down to work and that’s exactly what we did,” Crosier said Tuesday, following a budget meeting when the board discussed with Hampton the remaining money in the highway fund.

Hampton was appointed by the town board to fill Weaver’s vacancy until the winner of the election assumes the role in January. Crosier, a Berne Democratic committee member, said it was too late for Hampton to seek other party endorsements.

“It floored me because I didn’t see it coming,” Hampton said of Weaver’s leaving.

Weaver said Mark Dibble, the deputy highway superintendent, should be his successor. Dibble took over following Weaver’s resignation, Hampton said, but Crosier approached Hampton a few days later.

“Mr. Hampton had been doing the purchasing, the order of the trucks, and the town board felt that he was more qualified to run the highway department,” said Crosier. Hampton has handled parts purchasing for several years and sought prices for the purchase of large equipment this year.

“It’s not about driving the truck; it’s about scheduling work and the budget and stuff and Ed was pretty knowledgeable,” Crosier added, saying he approves of Dibble’s work.

The superintendent position has a salary of around $52,000.

Past disputes

Weaver, 58, had worked for the town’s highway department for nearly four decades. When his third term as highway superintendent was up in 2013, he said, in an agreement with incumbent Democrats, that he wouldn’t seek another term if his benefits would remain stable.

When he was told he couldn’t have the agreement in writing, since the board members involved could be voted out in the future, Weaver decided not to retire. He instead ran on the Republican line and won

“They told me that they would do that, and then, two days before the caucus meeting, the lawyer called me and told me, ‘No,’ so I kind of feel that I was set up,” said Weaver.

Weaver said he submitted his list of road projects the day after the board voted to have Crosier seek prices.

The town board approved its own list in September, and Crosier said the work was completed using a more durable method than the oil and stone used in Weaver’s list and for a lower overall cost. The roads will be sealed in the spring, he said.

“If they are saying I was negligent or I wasn’t on time with my paperwork, I used to have a secretary that told me when I had to have things in,” said Weaver. “She helped me very much with the paperwork. Now, I was paying for another woman that’s up in the town hall. She hasn’t notified me or hadn’t notified me that there was a deadline on anything. The secretary I have in my office doesn’t know these things.”

Concerns over the superintendent’s autonomy arose two years ago, when clerk positions in the town were restructured as part of the 2013 budget. A fulltime clerk with accounting skills was to work for the town and the highway department, moving the highway clerk to a position that would assist the full-time clerk and be paid out of the general fund.

The highway department eventually got its own secretary, but a system of purchasing is now mainly funneled through the senior account clerk, who uses software that tracks purchasing.

As the budget was being finalized, Hampton said the decision to remove the highway-clerk position could have a negative impact on communications within the department, but he said this week that he hadn’t known at the time that a part-time secretary would be there.

Among Weaver’s reasons for not getting a roads list in sooner, was a lack of highway workers.

“Depending on the size of your pocketbook, that’s what you work with,” said Hampton. “It’d be nice if you had a bunch of guys, but then again, can you keep a whole bunch of guys busy?”

In a shared-services agreement with the county, the town is able to use the county’s salt shed in Berne, for storage of salt and sand used on winter roads. Weaver did not use it, saying it didn’t make sense because a worker would have to waste almost 30 minutes for a loader to warm up in the winter months.

“If they do it, they’ll find I’m right,” said Weaver.

Hampton said he is open to trying.

Randy Bashwinger

A Berne-Knox-Westerlo graduate, Bashwinger said most people in the town know who he is and will find out more as he campaigns.

Bashwinger has sold building materials for Kamco Supply and Bellevue Builders Supply. He said he currently works as a project manager for Capital District Contractors and Decks, overseeing 33 people; he once managed 350 employees.

“I put in a lot of hours,” said Bashwinger, of 30 ongoing projects. “It’s a very big company. We do sunrooms; we  do decks, additions, driveways; we do retaining walls.”

Bashwinger lives in the Berne hamlet with his wife and seven children. He grew up in Knox, on Bozenkill Road, and took classes in construction in high school.

“He came voluntarily, and he’s very qualified, and I think he will be elected and do a great job,” Republican Chairwoman Peg Warner said of Bashwinger. “Mr. Weaver did a great job, because he was not a ‘yes’ man to Crosier.”

Bashwinger said he knows little of the situation between the town board and Weaver, but he wants to continue the former superintendent’s work.

“He was well known and very popular in the town and took care of pretty much anything that had to be taken care of,” Bashwinger said of Weaver. “Basically, I would love to follow in his footsteps and take care of the roads.”

Bashwinger compared the superintendent’s job to running a business.

“Doing it right the first time and not having to do things over and over and over again, because that’s not cost effective,” he said of customer service. “Taking people’s phone calls, not ignoring people. Listening and making sure everything is the way it should be taken care of.”

He said experience in a highway department isn’t necessary for the superintendent position.

“As long as you have customer service and are friendly with people and make sure the job is done and manage the roads and manage the materials, which I have no problem with,” he said. “I’ve purchased product from many companies. I feel I’d be fine with doing whatever task is ahead of me.”

Edward Hampton

Growing up in St. Albans in Queens, New York City, Hampton was fascinated with trains. A mechanic for most of his career, he still collects model trains.

“My father and mother had a business in Manhattan and Saturdays they would go in to work and they’d take the train in the subway and, when I was a child, I remember we’d go up to the front car because you could look out the door into the tunnel,” and watch the signals, Hampton said.

His family used to take summer vacations in South Berne, eventually moving there in 1968; he finished high school at Berne-Knox. A few years before, he played with Kenneth Weaver, who also visited for summer breaks with his family from Yonkers.

“We’d go outside, ride bikes, play in the creek,” said Hampton. As adolescents, Weaver was interested in motorcycles, Hampton in classic cars.

Hampton worked as a construction worker, then as a mechanic for locomotives at CSX, then for the Berne Highway Department, just a few miles from his home, in 2005.

“You have no life in the winter,” he said of the job. “If they’re going to say there could be a snowflake, well, up here you’re going to get a couple inches. Elevation dependent, you have to really, really be on the ball as far as when to call them out,” he said of snowplow drivers.

As superintendent, Hampton said, the most important thing for him is keeping the roads clean on a reasonable schedule during the winter months. The department’s trucks often have to make sure school buses are able to pick up students early in the morning.