Steady hands and an open door
As your Supervisor, I will bring career skill managing people and budgets and a knack for finding solutions. I am an experienced project manager: I assemble the right team, set clear objectives, build realistic budgets, and try to solve problems before they arise. I have a long history of getting things done.
I have lived and worked in Hyde Park long enough to learn from the mistakes of the past, and I believe we can build a better, stronger future. I love Hyde Park. We are a politically and economically diverse town, and beautiful, with so much to offer through our parks, our organizations, and our neighbors. No one should fall through the cracks.
I want to use this office to encourage honest, face-to-face dialogue as we take on the matters in front of us. I am asking residents to step away from the screens and come back to in person Town Board meetings and conversations. Let us find solutions together.
Russell and his wife have called Hyde Park home since 1988, where they raised two children in the Hyde Park schools.
"It is up to us to work together to ensure a strong and bright future. We are stronger together, Hyde Park."Russell Urban-Mead
The work ahead for Hyde Park
I am in the listening phase right now, learning from current board members and residents. Here is where I am focused.
Transparency at Town Hall
Right now, very little is shared about our budgets or how decisions get made. I will hold open, advertised workshop sessions, brief every council member fully, and bring real financial accountability back to Town Hall.
Keeping Hyde Park affordable
Focus on ways our town government can keep down costs so Hyde Park stays livable for working families, seniors, and for every income level in our economically diverse town.
Safety, roads, and flooding
Keep our roads sound and our neighborhoods safe, and take on the flood threats in the areas that need attention most.
The Route 9 corridor
Finally settle a workable plan for the Route 9 commercial sewer corridor instead of letting it drift year after year.
Parks and recreation
Expand recreation facilities and programs so there is something here for every age and every season.
Our historic places
Celebrate the sites that make Hyde Park special, including telling the full story of the New Guinea Community site.
A neighbor who shows up
- Thirty years as a professional hydrogeologist with The Chazen Companies, now LaBella Associates, protecting water and aquifers for Hudson Valley communities.
- Ten years of full financial and staff accountability leading Chazen's environmental services unit, the budget and management experience a Town Supervisor needs.
- A former Hyde Park Town Board member for Ward 1 from 2002 to 2003, where I helped launch the town's very first website.
- A Hyde Park neighbor since 1988. My wife and I raised two children here who both went through the Hyde Park schools.
- Treasurer of St. James Episcopal Church, and a volunteer with the Conservation Advisory Committee, the Hudson River Watershed Alliance, the Mid-Hudson Discovery Museum, and the Winnakee Land Trust.
- Retired from full-time consulting in 2025 to return to public service, with my remaining client work all outside Hyde Park.
Russell at the Hyde Park in Bloom garden tour.
Straight talk about 2003
In 2003, while I served on the Town Board, a group of developers did not like the new zoning we were proposing because they thought it would make them less money. They sued to block my vote, claiming that my work as a consulting hydrogeologist was a conflict of interest. Our Hyde Park Ethics Board determined that I had no conflict, but a judge ruled that the appearance alone was enough that I should not vote, so the new zoning Hyde Park needed failed.
A law professor described the 2003 ruling as harsh, writing that Hyde Park had been denied the vote of an elected official and calling the developers' tactic a misuse of our legal system. You can read that review here. There never was a conflict. I always followed the law and acted ethically, and that remains my approach. Having retired from full time work, the question matters even less today. And the zoning Hyde Park needed was adopted several years later with very few changes, so the ruling changed nothing in the end except to delay progress and waste town resources.
I believe in being upfront, so I would rather you hear this from me than from anyone else.
We are running together.
I am one of five Democratic Town Board candidates, and we are doing this as a team. There are no separate funds for individual candidates. One shared budget, managed by the Hyde Park Democratic Committee, supports the whole slate. Help us reach our goal so all five of us can get to work for Hyde Park in January.
You can also give by check or Venmo to the Hyde Park Democratic Committee.
Three ways to help today
- Donate to fund the entire slate, not just one race.
- Volunteer to knock doors, register voters, or host a gathering.
- Show up at a Town Board meeting now to support our three current Democratic council members.