Richmondville Sets Budget Workshop Meeting For Oct. 2

By Chris English

RICHMONDVILLE — Town of Richmondville Supervisor Jeffrey Haslun is getting numbers together for the 2026 budget, and in that vein the town board has scheduled a budget workshop meeting for 6 p.m. on Oct. 2.

The board approved the workshop meeting at its Thursday, Aug. 14 regular meeting.

"I don't have all the numbers yet," said Haslun, a retired Certified Public Accountant. "It will be a challenging budget." He added that he plans to present a tentative, preliminary budget at the September regular meeting.

In other actions from the Aug. 14 meeting, Highway Superintendent Brian Manchester reported that a new truck the town has been waiting on is scheduled to go into production in November. In other items from his report, Manchester said he and his crew removed asphalt and sidewalk on one side of the town municipal building just off Podpadic Road so a concrete slab could be poured for an addition to the building.

The $260,000 addition is expected to be finished by the end of the year. It should provide smoother access to the court part of the building while also increasing storage for that part. Manchester added in his report that his crew did ditching on Smith and Franzen Roads, and cut shoulders and ditched Boughton Road.

Haslun said that shifting about $60,000 to $65,000 from a reserve fund to pay for the new truck's chassis could require a permissive referendum. That means a legal notice will be published advertising the money shift and if no objections are received, the move would go ahead..

However, if the notice was met with significant objections, the move would become a ballot referendum to be decided by voters.

Town Clerk-Tax Collector Maggie Smith made it clear in her report that she is not a fan of the revamped Schoharie County website that recently came online. The revamping was done by a company called Revize. Towns across the county use its website as a kind of piggyback for their own websites.

"It's a huge mess, in my opinion," Smith said. "It's wiped out a ton of information, and I had spent so much time building our website with the help of someone from the county. (Now) there's no user friendliness. In lieu of another word, it sucks. I am stunned the BOS (county Board of Supervisors) did not talk to town clerks about this process."

Haslun responded that there were good intentions behind the website revamp and urged patience. As a town supervisor, he is also a member of the county Board of Supervisors.

"We wanted to upgrade so it had more features," Haslun said. "It's a work in progress."

Smith mentioned that she was told that each town needed its own IT (Information Technology) specialist to tune up its website in response to the revamped county site, but Haslun said that's not going to happen.

"No town has a specialized IT person within their staff," he noted. "This will get easier as it goes along and people get more familiar."

Haslun announced at the meeting that town court plans to apply for a JCAP (Justice Court Assistance Program) grant to pay for new and better audio equipment and also, possibly, more shelving for storage. It was also announced that a new 25 MPH speed limit for Court Street has been approved by the state and that signs should be going up soon.

Near the end of the meeting, the town board unanimously approved a resolution naming The Mountain Eagle the official newspaper for the Town of Richmondville. This resolution rescinds a previous one from Jan. 9 that had named another publication the official newspaper.