Supervisor's blog
Wow, three weeks ago we launched our new website and today I am writing my first blog in quite some time. We have a local company named Averill & Associates doing our site and what we have now is just the beginning. Averill is proposing a very interactive site which will have maps, surveys, transactions, and other things as we go forward. It will take some time; but, as we move along we anticipate a very productive website.
So, let’s get going:
Brush Pickup – Yikes! That February storm created a whole lot of damage to the Town of East Fishkill (as well as Wappingers, Fishkill, and the City of Beacon). I forget how much snow I had on my back deck in a day-and-a-half period, something like 25 inches (I remember I did a lot of shoveling!). It is hard to believe that towns not too far away got a few inches of snow or even rain. That being the case, Dutchess County did not declare a State of Emergency and we are receiving no State or Federal money (well, we may be able to get around $19,000 from the Feds if I can include enough documentation of the damage to satisfy their requirements). We knew we had to provide some sort of relief so we opened our brush drop off early (we have had over four thousand loads of brush and debris dropped off) and we got bids for four log loaders and enough trucks so they would not be waiting around for a truck to load. The idea is that by using four crews we could address the storm-related debris quickly before anyone could do any land clearing and such which we did not wish to pick up. Well, June 4th at three-thirty p.m. Highway Superintendent Dennis Miller called to say we were done (actually, we thought we would have been done two weeks earlier; but, at the last minute, the County called to say they would NOT pick up on their roads).
I have to thank Dennis for all of his hard work – during the pick up, Dennis worked ten to twelve hour days and oversaw the whole process. Whenever I had a question Dennis knew where every crew was and where they were going next – he was really on top of this program.
Now to pay for the brush pick up. Typically we budget approximately $70,000 for our brush program. With the February storm it was evident that that would not be enough to cover costs and, usually, after such an event there is State or Federal aid available from their emergency funds. Unlike other municipalities we sustained a huge amount of damage to our Town (and at 52 square miles – a rather large town), and we had to provide brush pick up. I estimate the cost will be somewhere around $800,000 (before 2006 we were paying several hundred thousand dollars a year for brush pick up; so, considering we have not had one for five years and the amount of damage we sustained, I think we are in the ballpark). We have a budget surplus in the General Fund and a small surplus in the Highway Fund and have paid off one bond for the Town-wide Revaluation this year and will pay off another bond for our landfill next year so we are looking to take some funds from the surpluses, use money which we would have been using to make bond payments, taking money from some other budget lines, and may even consider a short-term loan to spread the costs over two years.