Gil Davis, the Republican candidate for Town of Wawarsing Highway Superintendant, has lived and worked in the area for his entire life. With his background working for the highway department in the 1960s under former superintendent Harry Decker and his experience working in construction for over forty years, Davis, now retired, believes he is the right choice for the position.

“I’ve been talking to some of the people, they’ve stressed the one thing that they would like to see more of is the mowing machine,” says Davis. “When I worked for Harry Decker we put a man on the mowing machine all summer long — you have to have somebody out there. The next thing is the brush in the road. You have to cut the brush back to the tree-line… because a road that’s damp and doesn’t get sunshine will crumble as they run over it. You’re gonna [sic] lose the road. So you’ve gotta get the sun in there to dry the roads out.”

As for how he would work to avoid the kind of flooding that has plagued the Carlo Drive neighborhood in the past, Davis doesn’t think that the town is going to be able to do much, but does have ideas about a contributor to flooding in general that ought to be regulated.

“My biggest thing is that when they dump the reservoir in the middle of a rain storm when we’re getting flooded out. The city [New York City] doesn’t seem to care about the residents of the Town of Wawarsing. They just open up the floodgates and let it go.”

“What I want to do if I get into the town, is I want to have a logging system, so when you call with a concern, it gets logged into a book,” says Davis. “We’ll go and inspect your concern, me and a foreman from down there, and we will log it back into that book when we get back, and we will call you. You just call me once, I’m gonna call you back. And once the work gets done, I wanna call you again to see if the work is what you were expecting. I do want to hear from the residents, I do have an open door policy, because, bottom line is, I work for them. That’s who hired me — the residents of the Town of Wawarsing — and I want to do a good job for them.”

As for why he’s qualified for the job, Davis feels confident that his many years of experience working on roads has helped give him the ability to diagnose a road’s problems.

“It’s hard for me to explain, it just comes second nature to me. I can stand on a road and I can tell you what’s wrong with a road, the materials I’m gonna need to fix that road, the equipment I’m gonna need, the amount of man-power I’m gonna need, and the amount of man-hours I’m gonna need, because I’m a firm believer in a good day’s pay for a good day’s work.” Like his competitor, Democratic nominee Tony Paes, Davis feels it is important to give the town the best service possible while staying within the budget, rather than overspend.

Davis is enthusiastic about the people currently working in the highway department, saying, “They have some great mechanics working on the equipment, there’s a good bunch of guys down there, hard workers. I want to get along with them. I want to work as a team with these guys. And I think if the people vote for me, I know I can do an outstanding job for you, because this is what I’ve done for my whole life, and I want to work with those men. I want the Town of Wawarsing highway department to be one of the best in Ulster County, and if they just give me a chance I know I can do this job, and I know I can do a really good job for the people of the town of Wawarsing.”

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