Hurley highway superintendent wants town to pay for garage work

(From the Daily Freeman - Read full article >>) Town Highway Superintendent Michael Shultis is seeking the state Comptroller’s opinion in a dispute with Town Board members over a $14,000 invoice submitted to cover 528 hours of work done by department employees to get a new garage ready for operations.

The expense should be paid from the town general fund instead of the highway budget because it did not involve activity that repaired or maintained roads, Shultis said during a telephone interview Tuesday.

“We did a lot of work on the building,” he said. “We had to pour concrete, reset the toilet, do work on the sink and the plumbing…on the shop bathroom, we had to restore kitchen cabinets and refrigerator, we had to install air lines to the compressor.”

Shultis added that employees were initially told they would not have to do any packing or unpacking.

“It’s my belief that anything that doesn’t have to do with roads and culverts and bridges is a chargeback to the town,” he said.

Supervisor Melinda McKnight said discussions with highway personnel included the responsibility of a company that was hired to transport boxes and equipment from the former garage at 1035 Dug Hill Road and the new interim facility at 35 Basin Road.

“They were not contracted to unpack because the department members told me and other members of the Town Board that they didn’t want the moving company to unpack because they wouldn’t necessarily know where things were being put,” she said.

The invoice covered the time for Highway Department personnel over a four-week period beginning Jan. 18. Town Board members declined to reimburse that payroll expense during their Feb. 21 meeting.

“I understand the superintendent saying that this isn’t what they were paid to do but if it’s stuff that they have to use in the course of work why wouldn’t it be highway operations,” she said.

Town Board members in August 2022 agreed to a three-year lease at $66,000 annually for use of a 5,200-square-foot former distribution warehouse as a temporary highway garage. While the board considered the facility ready for occupancy in October there was a dispute with Shultis over the interior configuration.

The move was finally undertaken in January when town Fire Inspector Thomas Tryon declared the former facility to be unsafe based in part on deteriorating walls, a settling concrete slab, energy code violations, improper storage of combustible liquids, emergency exit signs that were not lit, and a fuel-fired heating system without proper shutoff protection.