At the Maybrook Village Board special work session on Thursday, April 1, several members of the Maybrook Village Board commended Mayor Dennis Leahy for his hard work and stated that he deserves at least a $5,000 raise.

“Directly because of all the work that this board has done under your leadership, we are no longer in fiscal stress...,” said Trustee James Barnett. “You have everything down that we’ve always done in this village with the hopes of doing it again in 2021.”

Leahy currently earns a $13,392.93 salary as part-time mayor.
Barnett added that Leahy has worked tirelessly to keep the village afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Sunday, March 28 the village hosted an “Easter Egg Drive-thru” at Frederick Myers Veterans Memorial Park that attracted over 100 children. During the drive-thru, children were given a bag of candy from several Maybrook entities including the village board as well as the fire and police departments. The Easter Bunny was also in attendance.

“The smiles on their faces, Kevin, Bob you wouldn’t believe,” Barnett said to Trustee Kevin Greany and Deputy Mayor Robert Pritchard. “We did all of this during a pandemic. Dennis I know you have worked unbelievably hard to do all this… You have worked so hard to keep normalcy in this village under this pandemic that I’m recommending tonight that you get at least a $5,000 raise for next year.”

The Village of Maybrook filed its tentative budget, which was due Friday, March 19 at 5 p.m. The Montgomery tax rate would go from $15.97 to $16.63 and the Hamptonburgh tax rate would go from $9.75 to $10.16, equating to a 4.2 percent increase. As it stands now, this will be the third budget without appropriated fund balance.

“I personally thought when we made the phone call to everybody last year that we should not take a raise because of the pandemic...,” Greany said. “I see no reason if you come in with a 3.5 percent tax rate increase why you couldn’t get a $5,000 raise this year. I said that last year, we have money left over.”

Pritchard agreed that the mayor deserves a salary increase for all the hard work he does.

“A $5,000 raise to the man who does probably 50 hours for every one hour that any of us on the board work probably collectively,” he said. “There is not a ball that I have ever seen that’s been dropped by this man and God help the village if you leave. I’m 110 percent behind a $5,000 raise for Dennis Leahy.”

The mayor thanked the village board for their gratitude.

“That’s the most important thing to me is just being appreciated,” Leahy said. “There is a lot of work that goes into this and I stretched it out even more. We don’t have the personnel to keep up a website and social media to try to keep the residents up-to-date with the events that we do. We don’t have an event coordinator, we are it.”