Highway Departments & Officials Are Requesting A Needed Bold Budget Increase, Partly Due to Snowstorms

Cornwall Highway Superintendent Tom Gschwind and other area Highway Officials Gathered to request More Efficient & Increased Funding in NY 2026/2027 Budget

Area Highway Superintendents and their staff met in Cornwall yesterday and met with Senator James Skoufis, Assemblyman Karl Brabanec, a representative of Assemblyman Brian Maher (who is away on a tour of duty), Orange County DPW Commissioner Eric Danega, and others, to hear details of a NY Budget request for major additional funding for the maintenance and repair of local highways and roads. These roads have suffered significant additional stress and damage during this exceptional winter weather, which included record-breaking snows and ice including two major snowstorms.

Not only did these men spend several 24-hour shifts to clear major snow and ice off of the roads, they enabled essential workers to travel to hospitals, rescue crews to tend to several dozen accidents, and everyday people get to work and make their living wages, they also went way above and beyond clearing the massive amounts of residual snow from corners and sidewalks so children could walk on the sidewalk rather than the streets.

Blooming Grove Highway Superintendent, Wayne Kirkpatrick said, "We applaud the efforts of our local Assemblymen, Senators and other officials for this effort being made for this needed additional funding." adding "And this weather is not over yet!"

Not only do forecasters predict more snow in March, and resulting damage to roads from the many rounds of plowing, there has been damage to some of their equipment, one plow losing its entire wing from the extra heavy load, along with a 10% increase in salt costs. Meanwhile these "Snowmageddon Heroes" took care of each other as well as their communities, frequently providing each other with mutual aid and equipment loans for days at a time. Adding to this season's highway stress has been this year's increase in construction traffic from new housing and commercial developments. These heavy equipment construction vehicles and tractors can double or triple the wear and tear on local road surfaces. Sometimes when a development is planned there is a bond set aside for road repair, but when there are smaller and unexpected instances there is often no bond and the local budget takes the brunt of cost.

A video of the Press Conference is available by e-mail (it is a 1.8 Gig file and I will see if I can obtain a compressed version), or I can forward it as is via ejreporter@gmail.com from the documents files we received.

Speakers emphasized that if these repairs cannot be done in Region 8 Departments,as part of the Budget, they will cost as much as 3x more if they need to be done via RFP (requests for proposals) and that there are tens of millions of previously alotted funding amounts that remains undispersed.

Local highway departments maintain 87% of New York State’s road system and more than half of its bridges, making it clear that New York’s infrastructure is local infrastructure. Nearly 48% of all vehicle miles traveled in New York occur on local roads, yet less than 12% of the taxes and fees paid by those drivers are returned to local governments for road and bridge maintenance. This disparity continues to grow as more electric vehicles, which do not contribute gasoline taxes, enter the system.

At this morning's press conference, NYSCHSA and NYSAOTSOH highlighted 2026–27 Budget Requests, including:

• Support combining CHIPS, Extreme Winter Recovery, and State Touring Routes into “Combined CHIPS”, with a $250 million increase, for a total of $1,138.1 million:

  • Increase CHIPS funding to $898.1 million

  • Maintain Extreme Winter Recovery at $100 million

  • Maintain State Touring Route funding at $140 million

• Support combining PAVE-NY and POP into “Combined POP”, totaling $250 million:

  • Maintain PAVE-NY at $150 million

  • Maintain POP at $100 million

• Support maintaining the Marchiselli Program at $39.7 million

• Support maintaining the local BRIDGE-NY Program at $200 million

The need for investment is substantial and well-documented. It costs five times more to rebuild a bridge and sixteen times more to replace deficient pavement than to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the estimated cost for work needed on locally owned bridges alone was approximately $29 billion in 2023. For perspective, from 2016 through 2024, the combined federal and state investment in New York’s local bridges totaled just $1.7 billion. NYSDOT’s most recent 20-year capital assessment further projects pavement needs at 2.5 times bridge needs, placing the combined local pavement and bridge funding gap at more than $100 billion.