CLIFTON PARK — The town’s highway superintendent is accusing the Supervisor Phil Barrett of playing politics with the town’s infrastructure by proposing to cut the 2024 road paving budget by 42 percent.
Dahn Bull, who is running for re-election in November, said Barrett’s slashing of the paving budget from $981,000 to $566,000 will directly “impact residents” by leaving the highway department “woefully underfunded.”
“As your highway superintendent, I have requested adequate funding from the Town Board so that we can continue to provide the services that keep our streets safe,” Bull said in a statement. “The decisions made by the Town Board for the 2024 budget will impact our ability to perform our necessary work for years to come.”
This is the latest chapter in a bitter political feud between Barrett and Bull that started in 2022 when Bull sided with Town Board members who accused the supervisor of fostering a toxic work culture in Town Hall.
Barrett said in an email that the overall highway department budget, in recent years, has increased by 30 percent and that the 2024 budget is “far from completed.” He also accused Bull for not spending all of his budget.
“We have documented how the highway superintendent neglected to spend over $700,000 allocated by the Town Board in recent years while he complains about funding,” Barrett said in an email.
Bull said he also lacks confidence that the 2024 budget will also include a new snowplow, which he says is needed, or engineering services to rebuild a town garage that burned down in August 2021. Bull said it’s necessary to replace the garage as the town doesn’t have enough storage for their fleet of about 25 vehicles.
“It’s like playing the ultimate game of Tetris to figure out how to move things around,” Bull said. “We don’t have enough storage now. We built an outdoor awning, so our work trucks are covered for the winter. But as the town grows, we need to grow. We are adding miles of roads every year and (Barrett) is tying our hands and keeping things from moving forward.”
Bull also said that the 2024 preliminary budget should be available on the town’s website. It is not.
Furthermore, Bull would also like to see the upcoming budget include new hires, saying the town has eliminated six positions from the highway department since 2011. Currently, 30 employees work for Bull.
“We don’t have enough employees if we do get additional trucks for additional routes,” Bull said. “We need the people to drive the trucks.”
Barrett countered that seven highway employees have left in recent months, “including three in the last week.”
Barrett, a Republican, and Bull used to be political allies. But Bull, who is now running as a Democrat, became a political pariah after he agreed with Town Board members who voted for an independent investigation into the work environment at Town Hall. After its approval, two of the board members resigned under pressure and a third, who also voted for the study, reversed herself, saying she wants to work as a team with Barrett.
The taxpayer funded study, which was done, was not publicly released and Freedom of Information requests to review the study have been denied. However, Barrett did release a few pages that mentioned Bull having an “unprofessional” email exchange with another employee.
Bull followed that up by releasing an email from Barrett in which Barrett wrote to Bull that this is “not the time for your passive aggressive wiseass bull—.”
In June, Barrett sent out a press release that called a paving job done by Bull’s department “substandard.” Barrett also took to the town’s Facebook page in March writing that Bull’s offer to give salt and sand away to residents prior to a storm, a normal practice in Clifton Park, was a “a misuse of publicly owned material … The highway superintendent does not have the authority to take this unilateral action.” Barrett also suspended Bull’s access to post infrastructure announcements on the town’s website.
All this comes at the same time that Clifton Park has announced three new walkway and bike trail projects that Bull said his crew will be responsible for maintaining.
“The community understands what the Town Board is doing,” Bull said. “Playing politics with our infrastructure and being partisan with our infrastructure. It’s very transparent. … Phil is doing everything he can to make me look bad. But the only thing he is doing is pushing off our infrastructure to down the road.”
