By William J. Kemble
Daily Freeman
HURLEY, N.Y. — The year 2025 is ending with a townwide ambulance service becoming operational. That accomplishment met the town’s biggest need and was among a list of big-ticket projects that seemed to move forward after years of discussions.
During a Sunday, Dec. 20, interview, Supervisor Michael Boms put the ambulance system, which went online in November, at the top of the list.
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“They’re answering 911 calls right now,” he said. “They were supposed to start sometime in March, but because of operational startups, they couldn’t (begin) until November. “It was getting insurance, getting billing departments, getting lawyers, and so forth. It’s just things that took a long time that we assumed would take a short time, but we were wrong.”
Help in the form of a $1.33 million state grant also generated a large sigh of relief this year for a town that has been dealing for decades with leachate seeping into groundwater from the landfill on Dug Hill Road.
“The study has already begun, and we’re in the third month … and it will take them two years to come up with a solution,” Boms said.
Over the past six years, officials have been putting town money into finding a solution to a problem that was identified in 1991. By 2012, chemical concentrations that included sodium and chloride were found in residential wells, with the first findings of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) turning up between 2018 and 2020.
“All the money that we put in … like the attorneys’ fees and the Crawford Associates engineers’ fees,” Boms said. “Anything that involved starting the process was reimbursed. … We’d put in about $70,000.”
There are also firm plans to return the Highway Department to a vacant area of property near the former landfill after three years of operating in a leased town of Kingston site. In October, the board approved taking out a $9 million bond to build a 14,600-square-foot garage near a former facility the department was forced to abandon due to health and safety concerns.
“Figure on Jan., we are going to start getting plans together … and then go for a bond,” Boms said. “It’s something that’s needed to be done because … we’re spending close to $90,000 a year in rent on our (current) garage that’s not even in the town of Hurley. The garage that’s there is not a suitable site that we can’t bring the trucks into … for any kind of repair. It’s too small of a shop.”
Projects that Boms would like to see completed in 2026 include the conversion of the former Hurley Library at 44 Main St. into a community center.
“Right now, we have engineers and architects doing value engineering … to lower the cost a little bit,” he said.
The town was approved for a $375,000 grant from Rockefeller Philanthropy and expects to put $125,000 into the project.
“If we start in the spring renovating it, I would suspect within (it will be ready) three months,” Boms said.
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