For nearly 15 years, Highway Superintendent Mike Zaleski and his crew have visited local elementary schools to give them a close-up view of the vehicles, offer insight on the responsibilities of the highway department and teach them the importance of road safety.

“My son had separation anxiety when he was a kid, and when he used to go to [this] school, the principal Mr. [Thomas] Payton used to come out and walk my son into school every single morning,” said Mr. Zaleski, the Riverhead News-Review’s 2024 Public Servants of the Year partly for his outreach. “I never forgot something like that, so I always wanted to give back when I’m able to. What a better way than bringing these trucks for show-and-tell — the kids love it.”

Over the last week, members of the department visited Roanoke and three other schools: Pine Tree Day Nursery, Aquebogue Elementary School and Riley Avenue Elementary School.

The two stars of the show-and-tell at Roanoke were the department’s bright yellow payloader and snow plow.

After the presentation, Mr. Zaleski and staffers gave safety-oriented coloring books to the children.

Check out the photos and video of the Riverhead Highway Department truck show-and-tell below.

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Once again, the editorial board who made these selections was proud to present the awards and spend time with so many who make Riverhead a wonderful community to live and work.

Photos by Ana Borruto

Community Leader of the Year

Starting with the 2024 Community Leader of the Year, Mark MK McLaughlin, who has been referred to as “an exemplary employee” by his boss Jodi Giglio and an “amazing guy” by Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard and who even won Riverhead Chamber of Commerce’s Business Person of the Year last year, Mr. McLaughlin said he has put his all into everything he does since he recovered from a medical event in 2020.

Educator of the Year

For being a morale-booster and advocate for his Riverhead Charter School students in the face of adversity, his hands-on approach, innovation and achievements made without a blueprint, Patrick McKinney was named Riverhead News-Review 2024 Educator of the Year. He said he plays just a small role in Riverhead Charter School’s success, highlighting the work by the teachers, staff, students, parents and administrators.

Sportspeople of the Year

Being a PAL coach is selfless. It takes time out of your life. Results are earned only through hard work and dedication. Building a football program from the ground up isn’t for everybody but Riverhead has the right people in place leading the way. For their efforts in and dedication toward the PAL football program, Rasheen Moore and Mike Heigh have earned the nod as 2024’s Riverhead News-Review Sportspeople of the Year. In their speeches they assured us that what they’ve accomplished is only the beginning.

Public Servants of the Year

Town Councilman Ken Rothwell was thrilled to hear that Riverhead Highway Department Superintendent Mike Zaleski and his staff were being honored with the Public Servants of the Year award for 2024.

“He loves where he works and lives, and he wholeheartedly deserves this recognition but I know that Mike would not accept this alone.”

In his remarks, Mr. Zaleski shared what his 31 years working in the department have meant to him.

2024 Businessperson of the Year Gabriella Volpe of Caruso’s was unable to attend the ceremony. Executive editor Brendan O’Connor accepted on her behalf.

People of the Year

The resumption of Riverhead’s annual Polish Fair was in large part thanks to the hard work of two community leaders: Polish Town Civic Association president Kevin Davis and Tom Najdzion, president of the Riverhead Polish Independent Club, which runs Polish Hall. For working together to revive the long running festival, the duo was honored as the News-Review’s 2024 People of the Year.

Click here for the Suffolk Times 2024 People of the Year speeches.

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“He’s one of the hardest working elected officials on the East End of Long Island. He genuinely cares about his town, loves where he works and lives, and he wholeheartedly deserves this recognition,” he said. “But I know that Mike would not accept this alone. He would tell you that it belongs to all the employees that work with him.”

Riverhead Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard said the town’s highway department is exemplary.

“They really bust their chops out there,” he said of the staff. “I give those guys a lot of credit. They are out there in all conditions and everything else. And Mike does a lot with the few people he’s got.”

Mr. Hubbard said the highway department is constantly assisting other departments. “It’s very refreshing to see — whether it’s loaning equipment to another department or just going out and doing work for them that would make it a lot easier than if they tried to do it themselves with their own equipment,” he said.

Trisha Yakaboski, Mr. Zaleski’s friend and campaign treasurer, said his love for Riverhead is evident in everything he does.

“He treats every street in this town like it’s the road that he or his parents live on,” she said. “When he goes running, he picks up trash. He’ll move branches out of the street.”           

The son of a Riverhead cop, Mr. Zaleski has been working for the highway department for 30 years — the last three of them, he’s been the superintendent. With a team of 40, it’s second only to the police department in size.

Riverhead Police Chief Ed Frost works frequently with the highway superintendent. 

“He’s a great person,” he said. “He does a lot of things for the town, and a lot on his own. He really goes out of his way.”

Mr. Rothwell said Mr. Zaleski is both a leader who empowers his employees and an innovator.

“Every single highway worker in the town of Riverhead brings knowledge to the table, and Mike understands that. He’s like, ‘Hey, if you guys can do this, show everybody, show me your forte, or what you can do,’” Mr. Rothwell said. “Mike gives people the opportunity to excel in that highway department as a group under his leadership, and his staff likes it … because it allows them to excel on their own.”

In one staff-driven department project, Mr. Zaleski worked with David Arteaga — a highway department worker, professional photographer and drone pilot — to create an innovative video showcasing the highway department’s equipment.

Mr. Rothwell said Mr. Zaleski has been “phenomenal” in managing his limited department budgeting.

“The man was left with a lot of long overdue, dilapidated equipment, some of it that really, quite frankly, looked like it should be put on a flatbed and hauled out of there,” the councilman said. “He has restored a lot of it, put a lot of it back to work, and repurposed a lot of equipment. He basically took all the leftover equipment around the highway yard and built his own striping truck.”

Mr. Rothwell is most impressed with Mr. Zaleski’s problem-solving skills.

“He built an overhead wash system to wash all the trucks,” he said. “That’s a major safety issue completely resolved by Mike. You had guys trying to climb on top of vehicles in the wintertime, trying to spray out salt with ice conditions and so forth, or … let it sit and then the equipment rusts. It rots, it gets damaged. So Mike and the highway department workers as a team built this whole overhead wash station … and they won a statewide award for it.”

Last fall, the Riverhead Highway Department won a state Department of Transportation ‘Build a Better Mousetrap’ Award for designing and constructing the new washing station. Previously, Mr. Zaleski’s department won a Northeast AAA Community Traffic Safety Award, among others.

He also developed a policy to strengthen filled potholes, according to colleagues. Previously, the highway department would “patch” potholes by filling them with asphalt material to repair localized damage. Under the current administration, potholes are “milled,” meaning a machine is used to grind down a larger section of the road to a specific depth, before applying a whole new layer of asphalt to the area, strengthening the damaged section of road. 

Ms. Yakaboski said Mr. Zaleski is as fastidious at home as he is at work.

“You should see his yard. It’s a meticulous yard. You could play golf on his yard. His grass is amazing — it’s almost obnoxious,” she said, laughing.

She said the highway superintendent has a soft spot in his heart for kids and cats, and that every year, he looks forward to his department’s massive toy drive for underprivileged Riverhead kids. “Truly, he would do anything to make any child smile,” she said. “He buys [McDonald’s] Happy Meals for himself for lunch, and I swear it’s so he can give away the toy. I’ve seen him hop back in his truck because he ran into somebody who might have their kid in the backseat, and it’s ‘Oh, I have something for him.’”

She said when he stops by her daycare facility, “it’s the same thing: ‘How many kids do you have?’ And he is going to count out his stockpile of McDonald’s toys. He’ll tell you he gets Happy Meals because it’s the perfect amount of food. I will tell you, it’s because he wants the toy so he can give it to a kid.”

For more than a decade, Mr. Zaleski has been representing the department in visits to local elementary schools. He and staffers bring equipment like snow plows and dump trucks to teach first graders about the highway department. The visit includes safety-oriented coloring books on topics like snow safety.   

“He’s definitely Riverhead, through and through” said Roanoke Avenue Elementary School principal Thomas Payton. “And you can see it when he’s talking with the kids. They’re in awe, and they’re listening to what he’s got to say, and they’re so excited that he’s here … You could just see how much he loves what he does.”

Over the summer, Mr. Zaleski decided to expand his annual school presentation into a full-blown highway department event.

“We had well over 100 kids here this year, and next year he wants to make it bigger and better,” said Joan Mottern, Mr. Zaleski’s administrative assistant. “He’s going to have a sand pile for the kids to play in.”

Ms. Yakaboski said that several years ago, Mr. Zaleski began running 5k races — and quickly became addicted, both to the racing itself and the fundraising.

“He does probably close to 20 [races] every year — all over the island. He does breast cancer races. He does the [Run for] Briggs race, the Run for Ridley. And God forbid he hears of a race for a child with cancer. If there’s a spaghetti dinner somewhere supporting somebody, he’s there.”

She said he’s less a Good Samaritan, more a great one.

“You know those bumper stickers, ‘I break for’ this or that? Mike’s would be too big for a bumper because he literally stops for anybody. There was a[n injured] baby deer he came upon once and he was calling up all the wildlife centers. He stops for turtles. He stops for injured birds … He always stops to help.”

For all these reasons, Mr. Zaleski and his team are The Riverhead News-Review’s People of the Year.

Previous Winners
2023: Diane Wilhelm
2022: Steve Shauger & Kristy Verity
2021: Dawn Thomas
2019: Allen Smith
2018: Dashan Briggs
2017: Richard Ligon
2016: Tom Lateulere
2015: Susan Wilk
2014: Carl James
2013: Dennis Cavanagh
2012: Ed Romaine
2011: George Woodson
2010: Robert Brown
2009: Barbara Grattan
2008: Liz Stokes
2007: Michael Reichel
2006: Gary Pendzick
2005: The Riverhead Ambulance Corps
2004: Richard Wines
2003: Ken Testa
2002: “KeySpan Coalition”
2001: Ed Densieski
2000: Judge Richard Ehlers
1999: Barbara Blass
1998: Vicki Staciwo
1997: Lenard Makowski
1996: Buildings & Grounds
1995: Jack Hansen
1994: Jim Stark
1993: Rick Hanley
1992: Lawyer Jackson
1991: Andrea Lohneiss
1990: Monique Gablenz
1989: George Bartunek
1988: Patricia Tormey

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This fall, Southold Highway Dept. workers are picking up an average of one dead deer a day, “and some days we’ll do pickups throughout the day,” said highway superintendent Dan Goodwin, describing that pace as consistent with previous autumns. Mr. Goodwin said that through the beginning of November, 523 deer carcasses had been brought to the town landfill, either by highway dept. staffers or residents.

On Shelter Island at this time of year, “we’re good for three to four a week, at least,” said Ken Lewis Jr., the island’s superintendent of highways and commissioner of public works.

In Riverhead, Mike Zaleski’s highway department staff averages between five and 15 — and sometimes as many as 20 — dead deer a week.

“During hunting season, they get flushed out more, so we definitely pick up more dead deer,” said Mr. Zaleski, a 30-year veteran of the Riverhead Highway Dept.

October through December is the most dangerous season for deer strikes on the North Fork, and across Suffolk County — which last year ranked third out of 62 New York counties for the most annual animal-involved collisions, according to AAA, up from sixth place in 2022. In 2021, Suffolk county had the second most animal collisions statewide.

It’s a perfect storm combo each fall when deer mating season and hunting season coincide with diminished food sources and days where dusk falls around 5 p.m. — when many drivers are commuting home from work.

During mating season, hormone-packed bucks are racing around chasing does.

In their mating season, “they’re more active, they’re up on their feet more often,” said Mr. Goodwin. “There’s less sources of food out there. What’s left of our farms have got cover crop in the fields, so they’re out searching for food and moving around. There’s also not as much camouflage because the trees have dropped their leaves.”

The Riverhead and Southold figures don’t include state and county roads, officials said. 

“We don’t do anything on [Route] 25 and we don’t do anything on Route 48,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Those are all picked up by the state or the county.”

In Riverhead, Mr. Zaleski said that deer pickups don’t include the Long Island Expressway or county roads like Route 58.

On Shelter Island, Mr. Lewis’ highway department handles everything, including Route 114.

“The majority take place on the state road [Route 114], which is probably the busiest thoroughfare for us, because it connects the two ferries,” he said. “And we’ve become a busier place for trade traffic that crosses over from the North Fork to the South Fork, using us as a sort of bridge. So that state road deals with quite a bit.”

If a deer does run out in front of a car, the best thing for a driver to do is not to swerve, experts said. Instead, hit the brakes and honk the horn, which may be enough to startle the animal out of the way. If a crash is inevitable, the best course is to steer into the deer. 

“Drivers should never swerve to avoid any animal, especially on country roads,” AAA Northeast spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. said in a statement last fall.  

The reason is simple: Swerving to the right could send the car into a ditch, tree or telephone pole, while swerving left could result in a deadly head-on crash with an oncoming vehicle. 

“While it’s not desirable, hitting a deer is better than hitting a tree,” Mr. Sinclair said.

In Shelter Island, the carcasses are compacted and trucked away by waste management services, while Riverhead and Southold bury their own.

“We have a deer pit on town property, in a brush yard of ours,” Mr. Zaleski said. “It’s a hole in the ground, and we fill that up. As they decompose, we put a layer of mulch over them, to keep the smell down and help with quicker decomposition. When the pit fills up, we simply dig another hole.”

Town highway workers also pick up and discard of other animal roadkill, from squirrels and turtles to possums and raccoons.

“It’s not one of the more glamorous parts of the job, that’s for sure,” Mr. Goodwin said.

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After years of arguing whether loose leaf pickup is a highway department job or a town responsibility, the Town Board and Highway Superintendent Mike Zaleski came to an agreement in October. 

The two sides asked for a legal opinion from the state Attorney General’s office, which in turn, contacted the state Comptroller’s office.

The Comptroller’s office found a 1976 case involving Brookhaven Town that stating: “A town board may direct the highway department to collect on a regular bases leaves and brush placed on a town highway right of way by property owners, with the highway department’s expenses chargeable not to the highway fund, but to the general fund appropriation for refuse collection.”

Thus, the highway department would be able to do the work, but the expense would come from the town general fund, not the highway fund.

The comptroller’s opinion states that the Town Board “shall create general fund budget line(s) for expenses related to loose leaf pickup in the amount of $219,018.88 for the year 2022.”  

And here’s where the snag comes in: Mr. Zaleski maintains that that $219,018.88 will come from the town and will enable the highway department to pick up leaves this year. 

If that money isn’t provided, he said, “I’m not going to do it.”

Town officials say that money comes from the 2022 budget, and Mr. Zaleski’s department already used that money to pick up leaves in January. 

The two sides were on the town work session agenda Thursday to try to iron out the situation. But Mr. Zaleski refused to attend. 

“I’m not going to any more meetings,” Mr. Zaleski said in an interview. “I’ve been to hundreds of meetings.”

He added, “the town is now trying to circumvent their legal responsibility to pay the highway department the agreed amount as stated by the state Comptrollers’ office.”

Both Mr. Zaleski and Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said their offices have been receiving letters and phone calls from residents asking why their leaves have not been picked up. 

Mr. Zaleski said in a letter to reporters after the meeting that the highway department has worked diligently on coming up with a legal solution to continue picking up loose leaves. 

He said that if the town doesn’t provide the $219,000, there will be no leaf pickup.

Town Board members said the money for leaf pickup will go in the 2023 budget.

“We agreed and Mike agreed to go by the findings from the state Attorney General‘s office,” said Councilman Tim Hubbard. “That finally came out this year in 2022. So we could not have budgeted the $219,000 from last year this year because that money didn’t come out until this year.” He said this money has been budgeted in years past for manpower, equipment and supplies. 

Councilman Ken Rothwell said Mr. Zaleski wasn’t even the highway superintendent until January of this year. 

Mr. Hubbard said, “We’re kind of at an impasse. He’s not going to pick up the leaves if he feels he hasn’t been paid or made whole for this year.”

Town Finance Administrator Bill Rothaar said that Nov. 20, 2021 was the deadline for the 2022 budget to be adopted, but the town didn’t even have a dollar amount for the cost of leaf pickup at that time.

Mr. Rothwell the problem should be fixed once the new year begins.

“If he does it, he gets paid,” he said. “If he doesn’t, he doesn’t get paid.”

Town attorney Erik Howard said Mr. Zaleski “is stuck with the budget that was implemented before he came into office.”

Ms. Aguiar said she’s hoping the issue is resolved soon. 

“Our office is getting a tremendous amount of calls asking about the leaf pickup,” she said. “I understand he’s told people to call the supervisor’s office because he’s not getting paid.” 

“The residents want this service,” she added. “Hopefully, we’ll see him next Thursday.”

The 2023 town budget is not expected to be adopted until Nov. 14, according to Ms. Aguiar. The 2023 town budget includes $221,000 for leaf pickup, although it doesn’t take effect until January.

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Newly elected highway superintendent Mike Zaleski sought to revolve the issue. 

In May, the Town Board and Mr. Zaleski agreed to seek an opinion on the issue from the state Attorney General’s office, which in turn, contacted the state comptroller’s office. The comptroller’s office found a 1976 case involving Brookhaven Town that stated: “A town board may direct the highway department to collect on a regular basis leaves and brush placed on a town highway right-of-way by property owners, with the highway department’s expenses chargeable not to the highway fund, but to the general fund appropriation for refuse collection.”

Thus, the highway department would do the work, but the expense would come from the town general fund. In Riverhead Town, all property taxpayers pay into both the general fund and the highway fund. 

That number should be increased each year, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency rate schedule. Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said in her 2023 budget message that “funding has been included to continue providing leaf pickup for our residents.”

The Supervisor’s 2023 tentative budget includes $221,000 for “leaf pickup.” The Town Board authorized the agreement between the Town Board and the highway superintendent for loose leaf pick up its regular board meeting on Oct. 4.

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“Now kids can be on this road safely,” said Highway Superintendent Mike Zaleski. 

Mr. Zaleski said the road has been on his priority list for several years. He recalled seeing kids walking on the narrow road, where school bus tires “were just a couple inches from them.” There was previously no sidewalk on the south part of the road. 

Cranberry Street is the road that connects Roanoke Avenue with North Griffing Avenue, and it’s used by both kids going to and come from school, and drivers looking for shortcuts. 

“It’s finished as of today,” Mr. Zaleski said Thursday. 

He said the project cost about $230,000, and that Dawn Thomas, the town’s community development director, will look for a grant to offset the cost of the project. 

Mr. Zaleski, who took office in January, said Ms. Thomas, deputy town engineer Ken Testa and Councilman Ken Rothwell were all supportive. 

“Everything we did worked,” Mr. Zaleski said. “Even after the heavy rain a few days ago, this road was bone dry.”

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The war between Russia and Ukraine, along with some other factors, has led gas prices to hit record highs in 2022 with the nationwide average ticking above $5 per gallon in June. Although prices have dropped in recent weeks, the average price for regular gas in New York on Aug. 15 was $4.17, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about a dollar per gallon higher than prices around the same time last year.

“I just did a study about four months ago, and basically everything went up like two dollars per gallon,” said Mike Zaleski, Riverhead’s highway superintendent. “So we’re all preparing our budgets for next year and preparing for the rise in all these fuel costs. I would say it’s increased on a percentage by 50% at least, close to 60%.”

Southold Town Supervisor Scott Russell similarly estimated a 50% increase in fuel expenditures if trends stay the same, although that may not be the case if costs continue to drop.

The police and highway departments are among the most heavily dependent on fuel costs, he said. The Southold Police Department, which originally budgeted $110,000, has already spent $112,000 on fuel by mid-August and the highway department, which is normally allotted around $105,000, has already been allocated approximately another $34,000 for fuel. 

Some other programs, such as Meals on Wheels, have also been impacted, he said, although that’s been offset by hybrid and electric vehicles.

Mr. Zaleski also noted the impacts to the police and highway departments, adding that every department has been impacted. 

“Even on a smaller scale, buildings and grounds will be riding lawn mowers every day. Across the board, it’s really affected [Riverhead] town,” he said. 

Riverhead’s Finance Administrator Bill Rothaar said the town hasn’t needed to make budget transfers yet due to the increases in fuel prices, which have been going back down recently. The highway department cut its fuel costs from $180,000 to $170,000 this year, he noted.

“We cut gas because we needed to cut something and we had not spent it all in highway,” he said. The Riverhead Town Board sets the highway budget.

Mr. Rothaar said that the town would, if needed, “find a line in highway budget and then when we needed it — let’s say in November or December — we could transfer that into the gas budget. But right now, we have no lines that are overspent or near being overspent.”

While fuel prices are usually volatile and difficult to predict, this year’s spike has put Southold Town “in a situation where our actual costs will far exceed what we had estimated originally for fuel costs, and there’s no way to escape that,” according to Mr. Russell.

“When you’re budgeting at the beginning of the year, you’re looking at trends over the past two, three, four years. I like to go back sometimes as far back as five years if I can, depending on what I’m budgeting for,” he said. “The problem is, the budget that I present to the board every fall, it’s a best guess-estimate based on previous costs of previous expenditures.”

Southold Town buys fuel in bulk by state bid and has its own fuel depot with two 7,500 gallon tanks, according to Mr. Russell. The additional funding is drawn from contingencies, a portion of the budget set aside to cover unforeseen costs.

“There’s peaks and valleys and you need to be able to absorb those in any budget,” Mr. Russell said. “Is it challenging? Absolutely. But it’s a large budget. And one of the things about falling short in any one line, it forces you to be conservative and look at other lines. That should be your first instinct, is to say, where can we find the funds to pay for this? By cutting back on other parts of the budget. That’s the challenge.”

The toll fuel prices have taken on town budgets shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, he added.

“Things fluctuate from year to year. Fuel tends to be very volatile. We’ll adjust, we’ll be fine,” he said. “When you run government, you’re going to find these challenges. This happens to be more challenging than most but we’ve been through things like this before and we’ll muddle through just fine.”

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