By Rob Sample
By a unanimous vote, the Marlborough Town Board set Tuesday, October 15 as the public-hearing date for the town’s 2025 preliminary budget. The meeting will take place at 7 p.m. and will precede the board’s own next meeting – which was moved from Monday, October 14 because of the Columbus Day holiday.
“Now that it’s budget season, myself, Chris [Budget Officer Christina Pulliam], and all the department heads have been going through all the numbers…setting up a tentative budget,” noted Town Supervisor Scott Corcoran. “We have a little more work to do but we’re trying to do as much as we can within the 2 percent cap that the state allows us – although they have no cap themselves.”
Corcoran pointed out that the state’s contribution to its Pension Fund went up a whopping 25 percent this year, while compensation costs for state employees rose by 11 percent. “But we [as a municipality] have to stay under that 2 percent cap.”
Doing so is difficult given what the town wants to achieve, Corcoran pointed out. “We also want to give our employees a raise – they deserve it,” he said. “We’ll work it out – we always do.”
Another key goal for the town is the remodeling project now under way at the Highway Department on Route 9W. Corcoran told the Town Board and meeting attendees that the Highway Department hosted a meeting on Friday, September 20 of contractors, Central Hudson Power, the town’s Information Technology staff, and others involved in the project.
“We’ll start to see work happening in the next two to three weeks,” Corcoran said. “I know the main contractor has already ordered the trusses, we already have our temporary trailers in place, [and] once we get the electric hookup to those trailers it will be a temporary base. We’re going to make an IT room in in those offices.
“The good news is they’re going to work on the exterior first – which makes sense before the weather gets bad,” he added, “then move into the interior – which means we’ll still be able to use a lot of the interior parts of the building for probably at least a month or so or more… Basically I’m just waiting on a couple of contracts to come back to sign and then we should move forward.”
In addition to the resolution setting the upcoming budget hearing, the Town Board okayed the adoption of an updated hazard-mitigation plan for the town. “Every five years FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] requires each municipality to update its hazard mitigation plan, which focuses on natural disasters, floods, wildfire risks, bad storms and basically pinpoints vulnerable risks that your town faces.
“The Ulster County Office of Emergency Management facilitated the latest update. We started in February of 2023, so it’s been year and a half of back and forth to update this,” Corcoran added. He noted that town codes are examined thoroughly to ensure, for instance, that no building takes place in areas such as flood plains or on steep slopes.
Corcoran’s office is working with people from the county to designate the Marlborough Community Center as a Red Cross shelter. He noted that it contains backup generators and a redundant heating system. “That’s going to be a very good thing because there’s nothing down in this part of the county that has that,” Corcoran said.
During the business portion of the meeting, the Board also voted in favor of resolutions to approve the hiring of Joseph Gantin as a part-time police dispatcher, and to accept the road dedication of Bayside Drive. The latter resolution also authorized Corcoran to sign the consent of dedication.
The Board also announced that the County’s tourism and economic development teams plan to visit Marlborough this week. The tourism people will be in town on Wednesday, October 2, while the economic development group will visit on Thursday, October 3. Representatives from Meet Me in Marlborough will assist in the briefings, which both begin at 11 a.m.