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

  • Executive Director for the New York State Association of Towns Chris Koetzle laid out for The Enterprise how Berne may be able to go about enacting its current draft budget for 2025 without a board to authorize it, or vote to override the 2 percent tax cap. However, he warned that the situation was unprecedented and that it’s up to the comptroller’s office to determine how to proceed. 

  • Supervisor Dennis Palow has released a new tentative 2025 budget that would increase taxes by 2 percent, not 19 percent as proposed in an earlier tentative budget that was published last week. Among the expenses he cut in the new version is for ambulance service from the county.

  • 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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