The Shawangunk town board opened its March 23 board meeting by honoring a resident with the first Dick Parker Community Service Award of 2024: Steve Schelin, a passionate town employee who manages the transfer station, among several other jobs.

Councilman Brian Amthor explained that the board, in collaboration with the South Ulster Rotary, conceived the Dick Parker Award in 2022 as a way of spotlighting outstanding residents for their work and devotion to the community. He mentioned that choosing Schelin for this quarter’s award was a no-brainer.

“We have given this out to several residents on both sides of the town who exemplify what it means to go above and beyond for the community,” Amthor said. “Our first award for this new town board was a unanimous decision of who this person was going to be.”

Supervisor Ken Ronk Jr. asserted that Schelin was the town’s best representative and listed his work in the transfer, parks department, building department, and more.

“This person is a very loyal town employee for many, many years, wears a lot of hats, and I’ve known him to be the best ambassador for the town that we have,” Ronk said. “He runs the transfer station for us, he works in the parks, he shovels snow, he works in the buildings. “He does just about everything there is, and he has just enough time to deliver newspapers and bust my chops.” (He makes a weekly trek to Albany to pick up the Wallkill Valley Times at the printing plant and deliver the papers back to the valley.)

Ronk also recounted a story about Schelin finding and returning a former resident’s family heirloom after they accidentally threw it away, just one example of how he salvages items that could still be useful.

“There was somebody who was moving out of town and they were getting rid of a lot of their things, and they had accidentally thrown their grandmother’s pan, into the bin, and they were heartbroken and upset,” Ronk said. “Steve jumped into the container and rifled through all the stuff until he found that treasured heirloom pan.

“Those are the kinds of things he does every day, he saves stuff to the side that he thinks people might use rather than let them go in the waste stream,” he continued.

Ronk added that the board recently received a report from the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency stating that the town had 0% contamination in its recyclables, largely thanks to Schelin’s careful filtering at the transfer station.

“Recently, we got a letter from the resource recovery agency,” he said. “The report showed that we had a 0.00% contamination rate of our recyclables. I told him (Schelin) about it and saw his face light up because he really takes pride in the job he does.”