HADLEY — In the first few months of his new job, Marlo Warner II has fixated on solving some old problems.
This week, for example, the 50-year-old director of the Hadley Department of Public Works has a backhoe on his mind. The machines are built to last 15 to 17 years, he said. Hadley’s backhoe is a 1996 model.
On Thursday, residents will vote in a special town election be able to vote on whether Hadley should spend money on a new model. Voting hours will be from noon to 8 p.m. at Hopkins Academy.
The town had spent $26,000 in upkeep on the machine in the two years before Warner arrived, he said. And it still needs $10,000 more in repairs, he said.
“It’s important to get the new backhoe going forward, because the one we have is costing us more money than a new one would,” Warner said.
Warner’s time began in March, and the backhoe isn’t the only outdated infrastructure he’s worked on fixing since then. Most of the DPW’s energy has been focused on construction along route 9, he said. There, the DPW is removing a piece of century-old water main and reattaching residents’ water services to a newer main.
Then there’s the challenge of digitization, a project Warner said he hopes to tackle in the long term. Most larger towns and small cities already have sewage and water maps available on computers, but Hadley is behind on the trend.
That can cause some practical problems when a water or sewage emergency arises, he said.
“At this point, we have very little digitized,” he said. “It takes a long time in the middle of the night to find the prints.”
Warner has two decades of experience in public works departments. After getting out of the U.S. Air Force – where he served as a sergeant, which he said prepared him for the kind of worker management he does at the DPW – he spent time working for a private contractor.
That led him to the public works field, he said, and in the mid-1990s, he took a job with the public works department in Shelburne, Massachusetts. After three years there, he moved to the public works department in Greenfield, his hometown. He worked there for 16 years, and in 2012, he was promoted to field superintendent.
Warner took over at Hadley’s public works department more than a year after his predecessor, Gary Girouard, announced his retirement. Hadley’s DPW is a smaller operation than Greenfield’s, Warner said – he supervised seven different divisions in Greenfield and covers just four here. That brings with it its own challenges, he said.
“The DPW here has the same issues as a larger DPW, so you have to be very crafty and think outside the box with your staff levels,” he said.
With a three-person water department, he said, he might have to pull from another department if there’s an emergency and one employee is unavailable. Managing those moving parts might be the only way to accomplish tasks.
Still, Warner said, the transition from Greenfield to Hadley has been smooth. For him, improving the city’s infrastructure – taking out the old and putting in the new – offers its own buzz.
“The challenges that we go through – what needs to be accomplished – has energized me,” he said. “Every day, I feel like I’m building or accomplishing something.”
Jack Evans can be reached at jackevan@indiana.edu.