“As I see it, I have been working for the town since I was a little boy,” Pine Plains Highway Superintendent Carl Baden said on a lovely September late afternoon in the Town Park. He explained that he grew up, pedaling hard, to deliver the Register Herald on his bike to as many as 375 households. Then, in addition to a 17-year stint as a school bus driver, Baden has been a longtime member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, a builder of sets for the high school plays, a member of the Town Beautification Committee and, with Ibis Guzman, the co-creator of Town Decoration Day.
Last October, Baden made his debut at the Evergreen Cemetery Lantern Tour, hosted by the Pine Plains Free Library and the Little Nine Partners Historical Society, playing and singing the role of World War I vet Earl John Vosburgh. A few days later he was elected highway superintendent as a write-in candidate after Lisa Ferguson, on the Republican ballot line, withdrew from her campaign. He is seeking a four-year term with the endorsement of the Democratic Party. Summing up his candidacy, Baden said, “I am a hands-on guy with a goal to help this town.”
As superintendent, Baden said he has worked 24/7. A call from a state trooper about a downed tree can come at 2 a.m. He said that his cellphone is always on and he monitors the work of his four-man crew over a radio when he is not on-site. A lot of maintenance is required for 38.7 miles of town road, and he said it’s a big challenge to keep costs down and attend to problems before they become more expensive. For instance, he said he monitors ailing trees, anticipates when they will need cutting and takes them down when funds are available.
Baden noted that the job involved working with many different groups—homeowners, rescue squads, troopers and town police, the Town Board, his own staff, and highway superintendents from other towns. It’s vital, he said, to know how to talk with people, hear different perspectives and recognize common goals. Baden said he learned this skill of “continuity” in his landscape business of 25 years, Emerald Green. Since last November he has continued to run the company while working as superintendent. He said he has handed over the majority of Emerald Green’s projects to his employee and now does the work for only a few longtime clients. He added that when he was encouraged to take the position by the town administration, he was told that he would not be required to close his company as long as he did the town work.
Running his business has helped him with the technical aspects of the superintendent’s job, Baden said. What he has done with individual homeowners’ landscapes he is now doing for the town landscape and it helps that he has spent years plowing roads and driveways. There is no formal requirement for highway superintendent but Baden said it can come in handy to have a commercial driver license (in his case, a class B), which allows him to plow the three larger roads when someone calls in sick.
While Baden said he has always felt comfortable with the job’s “outside” work —general road maintenance, plowing during the winter months, responding to tree damage from summer storms—the “inside,” or office, work has been a challenge and he has had to go “outside his comfort zone,” to understand and manage it.
Baden lives in Pine Plains with his wife, Amy Benack-Baden, and they have two daughters: Eliza, a student at Stissing High School, and Chloe, who is in her first weeks at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Asked to look into the future and say how he would want his years in office to be described if he won the election, Baden said, “that I had happy employees”— and that he kept the roads clean.
The election is Tuesday, Nov. 7. Early voting is from Oct. 28 to Nov. 5. Information about early voting can be found here.
Correction: The position title in the headline was corrected to “Highway Superintendent” after the newsletter was published.