Highway Superintendent Neil Marzolf Jr. and the Town of Darien
Jay Nachman - Profile Correspondent - June 2026
Neil Marzolf Jr., the highway superintendent of Darien, loves plowing snow. Which is good because the town in western New York, about a half-hour east of Buffalo, averages approximately 86 in. a year.
Less enjoyable is what he called "chasing the wind."
"I love plowing snow," he said. "You can have a beautiful snowstorm and that's easy. And three days later the wind blows and now you're chasing the wind. You're out there and you can have bare spots and then I'll have a foot of snow on the road and then you have to chase the blow-overs constantly.
"It might not snow for two days, but you're out plowing every day because the wind's blowing it all over the place," he added.
Neil, 57, has been chasing the wind and paving roads and clearing brush in Darien for approximately 30 years. He was hired in 1997 by his father, who recently passed away, had worked in the Darien highway department for 46 years and served as superintendent during his last 20 years in the department. When his father retired, Neil was elected superintendent.
Prior to being hired, Neil had been working in Buffalo for a company that hauled fly ash from a coal plant. And what had been a 30-minute commute became a five-minute commute in the town Neil has lived in all his life.
During his 19 years in office, he has worked on all sorts of projects.
The most recent project he completed during his 19 years in office was overseeing the installation of a 7-mi. force main sewer line connected to the village of Corfu, which borders Darien to the north.
The department is responsible for the township's sewer plant and lines and Darien's sewer plant needed to be upgraded. Instead, the town chose to install a sewer line that connected to Corfu's.
"They just upgraded theirs and they had plenty of value to be able to handle it, so we decided to go that route and get out of the plant business," Neil said.
The approximately one-year, $4 million project also necessitated the construction of a pump station, which sends the town's sewage downhill to Corfu. The new sewer line was expected to go online June 1.
The tanks from the previous plant will be removed once the new line is functioning.
The Corfu plant also treats the sewage from other neighboring municipalities, schools and some area businesses.
"For the people in town, it's going to save them a lot of money in the long run because these plants, their usual average lifecycle is 25 years," Neil said. "So, in 25 years from now, you're going to be doing this all again. And with all the regulations coming down from DEC [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation], it just gets harder and harder. Then you still got to pay a guy to monitor this and maintain everything, and you're getting out of it all and it's going to go. Corfu's going to handle it all."
Working with other municipalities is old hat for Darien, which has a whopping 20 shared services agreements with other municipalities. Shared services include truck-hauling stone and blacktop and other materials, roadside shoulder work
"We've gone to other towns and helped them with our excavator, helping do pipe work, ditch work, picking up trees after storms," Neil said. "Our guy went down to neighboring towns with their roadside mowers. We'd go help them out and mow a few.
"I had a town beside us, he lost a snowplow, and we picked up four or five miles for him to help him out plowing during wintertime," he added. "You name it, we all help each other, whatever somebody needs. We don't keep track. We just help each other and one year he might get me and the next year I might get him."
Besides being neighborly, there is a budget benefit.
"If you had to hire out some of that stuff, it would take a chunk of money out of your budget, for sure," he said.
A budget buster in recent years is the ever-increasing cost of vehicles. Dump trucks get replaced every four years. The department budgets for other replacement vehicles and other expensive equipment on an as-needed basis.
The township recently purchased a dump truck and it was $390,000.
"When I started here, the first truck I bought was $180,000," Neil said. "In the last six years, since COVID hit, the equipment is darn well close to almost doubled."
COVID also affected the supply chain. Neil said he used to order a truck and it would take 90 days to arrive and the plow equipment would take another month or two. By the time the plow was mounted on the truck, the all-in timeline was about six months.
Now, a truck takes almost a year to arrive. The plow equipment takes another six months, meaning that a truck isn't ready to roll out for approximately 18 months.
"You used to have your plow equipment waiting for your plow and chassis," Neil said. "Now, the truck and chassis come in and your plow equipment, you're waiting for that to come in. It's all changed, and it's made it a little difficult to try and figure it out. You're talking a year-and-a-half out so you've gotta budget. And then, actually, you're not spending that money until the following year or possibly two years out.
"But you're trying to keep your replacement schedule going and it's made a challenge out of it, to be honest," he added.
Neil said the town will be purchasing a new mowing tractor next year. That will cost approximately $150,000. The last one he purchased was in 2017 and that one was purchased for $85,000.
Darien's vehicle inventory includes five Peterbilt trucks with plow wing sanders. They range in age from 2005 to 2000. The department also has a new, 2026 Western Star heavy-duty truck and uses two F-450 pickup trucks and an F-250 with V-plows.
The town also owns a 2015 and a 2020 John Deere loaders and four John Deere tractors. The oldest, from 2004, is a broom tractor. The newest tractor was purchased in 2017. Rounding things out are a 2016 Reiser trailer, a 1998 Daewoo excavator and a 1971 Sicard snow blower that mounts to the loader.
"It's vintage, but it gets the job done," Neil said.
The town barn has 10 bays. Four bays were built in 2015, when renovations were made to the office, break room, locker room and bathroom.
Another example of inflation, Neil said, is how much it now costs to put oil and stone on the roads to keep them maintained. Applying oil and stone on one mile of road cost approximately $12,000 when he started. Now, it costs $30,000 a mile.
Also pinching the town's budget is a change made at the county level. The county of Genesee shares its sales tax with Darien. But about three years ago, the county changed the agreement and cut the amount the town receives.
Darien went from having no town tax to having a tax of one dollar per $1,000 based on the assessment of a property or house to make up for the money the town used to get from the county. Neil added that the tax income is distributed among all Darien departments.
The department budget is $1.5 million, and the CHIPS allocation is $265,000.
Darien, which was founded in 1832, is a small town with a population of approximately 3,000 people. It is made up of 47.6 sq. mi., and the topography ranges from undulating to hilly and it is bordered by Erie County to the west and Wyoming County to the south.
Darien was referred to as the "Place of the Turkeys," by the Seneca Tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy and residents will see turkeys and deer strolling around town.
"We got turkeys, got a lot of deer," Neil said. "It's good hunting in the area."
Neil takes advantage of the outdoors. For fun, he likes to hunt and fish and take vacations with his family, his wife, Laura and his two daughters, Grace, 27, and Carson, 25.
The town is split into four different school districts, so children in Darien go to schools in the neighboring districts of Alexander, Pembroke, Alden or Attica all the way through high school. As part of the shared services agreement, Darien sealed parking lots for the Alexander School District and built a driveway to their ballfields.
Neil went to Alexander High School, where he played baseball and football. He'll sometimes run into his old schoolmates and neighbors, who'll often give him compliments for the work he's doing.
Laura, his wife, also is complimentary about his hard work on behalf of the town.
"My husband has shown the utmost level of dedication to his position, most especially throughout the difficult winter seasons," she said. "These extra challenging circumstances occur even with the support of the town board for his knowledgeable decisions. The town of Darien can only hope someone with the same level of commitment will replace my husband as highway superintendent in the future because his service has been nothing but selfless and priceless."
A project that is nearing completion for the department is changing the drainage pipes under the roads to carry water from one side to the other from steel to plastic.
"Obviously, the steel ones rot out, and cave in, and deteriorate over time," Neil said.
Before he embarks on paving a road or other major work, the department will change the sluice pipes to plastic then "clean the ditches around them and stuff like that and then we put the lipstick on it, put the blacktop on it and make it look beautiful for a time."
The replacement project began with Neil's predecessor, his dad, and he's been carrying it on since taking office in 2008. There are only 12 pipes left to complete the project and the department averages about six-to-10 pipes replaced a year.
Neil said he spends approximately $15,000 to $20,000 a year on the sluice pipes, which range in size from 12 into 5 ft. in diameter. The county takes care of any pipes more than 5 ft.
"It's a good project," Neil said. "When you get them all done, then you can pretty much forget about them. Probably the oldest ones we have in the systems, the plastic ones, they've got to be probably 40, 45 years old now and we've never had to replace them. The steel ones, you might get 20, 25 years out only and you'll have to replace them."
An ongoing project for the town is repaving the shoulders of the roads from 22 ft. to 26 ft. wide.
"When you're plowing them, you're on pavement," Neil said. "You've got good shoulders. You don't have to replace the inside of the road's curves. They wash out on hills. Once you pave them, all that extra work that you're always monkeying with, it's gone. It's been a great thing that we've added to our plan, milling out four-foot of the shoulder, and we pave them four inches deep and then, usually, we do an overlay over that road the following year or we'll oil stone over the top of them to preserve them."
In the winter, Neil said, "You're not tearing up your shoulders when you drop your wing. You're on pavement, you can drop all your iron down and when you salt, then you've got more working area to plow.
"And it makes the road safer, too, because you've got a 10-foot lane and then all of sudden you've got a bad spot of your shoulder and somebody hits that, it could throw the vehicle off the road," he added. "Now, you're kind of taking away that."
Additionally, he said, the repaving acts as preventive maintenance because it eliminates a lot of the repair work that takes place after rainstorms or when snow melt washes away dirt shoulders
Of the town's 42.5 mi. of roads, Neil said the department has widened approximately 30 mi. of them. The project began in 2013.
Working with Neil in the department are his deputy, Joe Marino, and motor equipment operators Adam Lavrincik, Mike Bykowski and Curt Lamb. Brian Bontrager serves as a part-time plow driver.
"I like the guys I work with," Neil said. "I love doing projects, making things better for the community and for the people. Just having safe roads.
"We do the same stuff every year, but it's a cycle," he added. "You go out and you trim trees, cut trees, clean ditches, change culvert pipes, pave a road a year, oil and stone six seven miles a year. Then you get to wintertime. Plowing is the one thing you're not going to get out of every year. That's your main winter work. All the outside things you're doing is something a little different. Like roadside mowing. And that goes on all summer long. I like the projects. I like the work and the people are good. I've been lucky enough to have great town boards, and I get along with them. Everybody works along with each other. I like the job."