The Village of Boonville, population 2,020 at the 2020 Census, currently has four separate New York State grants open and tracked on the state’s public Consolidated Funding Application dashboard, according to records CNY Signal pulled directly from regionalcouncils.ny.gov. Combined, the four awards total $12,828,125. Divided across the village’s Census population, that works out to $6,351 in active state grant money per resident, a figure CNY Signal calculated using the 2020 Census count and the four award totals listed on the state’s own project pages.

None of the four grants are new. The oldest contract was executed in July 2023 and the newest in March 2026. But the state’s tracking dashboard, which is supposed to show real time status for every Consolidated Funding Application award in New York, currently displays two entries that CNY Signal’s review found do not line up internally, even though both projects carry a “Green, On Schedule” status label.

The largest of the four awards is $7 million for improvements to the Mill Creek interceptor and the village wastewater treatment plant, announced in a Governor’s office press release dated March 12, 2026. The release quoted Village of Boonville Mayor Judith Dellerba saying, “Improvements to the Mill Creek interceptor and our wastewater treatment plant have been needed for a long time, and this funding makes it possible for us to finally move these critical upgrades forward.” The state said the award is funded through the Environmental Bond Act and follows an earlier Engineering Planning Grant from the Environmental Facilities Corporation that helped the village prepare project plans.

A second wastewater award, separate from the Mill Creek money, is a $1,000,000 Water Quality Improvement Project grant to install ultraviolet effluent disinfection at the treatment plant. The state’s project description says the equipment “will improve water quality by reducing pathogens in the plant’s discharge,” a standard upgrade many small New York treatment plants have pursued in recent years as state water quality standards for discharge into local waterways have tightened. The state’s project page, filed under CFA number 109262 in program round 11, shows the contract was executed July 11, 2023, with an “Anticipated Completion Date” listed as Saturday, May 9, 2026. That date has now passed. As of the date CNY Signal pulled the record, August 12, 2026, the listed completion date is 95 days in the past, a figure CNY Signal calculated by counting the days between May 9 and August 12, 2026. The same page lists “Grant Money Disbursed to Date” as $0. The project’s status field still reads “Green, On Schedule.”

The disinfection grant is not Boonville’s first time working through the Consolidated Funding Application process, and the village’s older grant history shows the same tracking system can and does close projects out cleanly when the work is finished. An earlier village award, a $750,000 Community Development Block Grant for what the state’s dashboard calls the “1792 Box Culvert Project” to replace undersized storm water infrastructure, had a contract executed March 1, 2017, and an anticipated completion date of December 12, 2019. That project’s state page now lists the full $750,000 as disbursed and carries a status of “Blue, Complete,” not “Green, On Schedule.” That closed out grant is a full nine years old and falls outside the four active award total CNY Signal calculated for this story, but it matters here because it shows the dashboard’s status labels do change once a project genuinely wraps up. The two entries flagged above, by contrast, remain marked “Green, On Schedule” despite one missed date and one date that predates its own contract.

CNY Signal is not asserting the disinfection upgrade itself is behind schedule or that no work has occurred at the plant. Physical construction and state reimbursement do not always move on the same timeline, and disbursement figures on state dashboards can lag behind actual site work. What the record shows, in the state’s own words, is a project marked on schedule with a completion date that has already passed and zero dollars logged as paid out.

The village’s third grant is $4.5 million awarded through the state’s NY Forward program, announced in a Governor’s office release dated February 12, 2024. NY Forward and the related Downtown Revitalization Initiative fund small city and village downtown investment across New York. Mayor Dellerba was quoted in the announcement saying, “We are profoundly grateful that Governor Hochul has taken an interest in our small village and sees potential for Boonville’s future.” State Assemblymember Ken Blankenbush was quoted separately saying, “The Village of Boonville is a small community with a large historic influence in Oneida County.”

The village’s own NY Forward planning committee, boonvilleforward.org, lists 12 specific projects the community proposed for funding, ranging from a $1,664,000 downtown gateway and wayfinding package to a $840,000 rebuild of the historic Slim’s Diner building to a $194,000 accessibility and repair project at the VFW Hall. Those 12 proposed projects add up to $6,889,000 in requested funding. The $4.5 million award covers 65.3 percent of that request, a percentage CNY Signal calculated by dividing the award amount by the total requested across the 12 listed projects. The village’s NY Forward committee has not yet published which of the 12 projects received full funding, partial funding or no funding under the $4.5 million award, and that allocation was not available on the public planning site as of this reporting.

The fourth and smallest award funds work inside Erwin Park, the village’s 22-acre park off NYS Route 12 on the Black River Scenic Byway. According to the Village of Boonville’s parks department page, Erwin Park already offers a paved walking trail, playgrounds, tennis courts, a softball diamond, picnic pavilions and a covered bridge connecting to the Black River Feeder Canal towpath trail. The state’s CFA project page, filed under an Environmental Protection Fund parks and heritage grant, lists an award of $328,125 for what the state calls the “Erwin Park Renewal” project. The description on file covers a revamped main entrance on Route 12, a boardwalk and canoe and kayak launch on the Black River Feeder Canal, an amphitheater built into the surrounding hillside, and resurfacing of the park’s tennis court.

The Erwin Park page shows a contract execution date of Monday, February 10, 2025, and lists $165,644 already disbursed to the village, which is 50.5 percent of the $328,125 award, a percentage CNY Signal calculated from the two figures on the state’s page. But the same page lists the project’s “Anticipated Completion Date” as Thursday, February 9, 2017, eight years before the contract that funds the work was even executed. CNY Signal confirmed this exact date twice by pulling the raw page text directly rather than relying on a summary. The project’s status field, like the disinfection project’s, still reads “Green, On Schedule.”

The renewal work is happening in a park the village already relies on for regular summer programming. According to the village’s parks page, Erwin Park’s pavilions rent for $100 in June, July and August and $50 in May and September, and the park stays open from 8 a.m. until dark with no glass bottles or animals allowed. The Black River Feeder Canal towpath that the new boardwalk and kayak launch would connect to already carries hikers and cyclists north toward Forestport along the old canal corridor. A hydration station was added to the park more recently, funded through community foundation support rather than the state grant reviewed here, according to the village’s own park listing.

A completion date that predates a project’s own contract by eight years is not something a construction crew or a village clerk controls. It is a state database entry, and it most likely reflects a data carryover from an earlier funding round or an unfixed placeholder rather than an actual timeline promise made to Boonville taxpayers. CNY Signal is not alleging any wrongdoing by the village, the state, or any official named in this story. The village applied for and won these grants through the standard Consolidated Funding Application process that hundreds of New York municipalities use every year, and Boonville’s applications and progress on the Mill Creek, NY Forward and Erwin Park work all appear, based on the public record, to be advancing normally. What the record does show is that the tracking system New York uses to tell residents whether a taxpayer funded project is on time contains at least one entry that cannot be literally true as written, and one more where a completion date has passed with no funds yet logged as disbursed.

Boonville is not a large village. Its 2020 Census population of 2,020 people live across 1.73 square miles, a population density of 1,168.1 people per square mile according to Census figures. The four grants tracked here touch a wastewater plant that serves every household connected to village sewer, a downtown business district the village has spent years trying to revive, and a 22-acre park that already hosts the summer farmers market and village band concerts. Residents who want to check any of these figures themselves can search the village’s project names directly on regionalcouncils.ny.gov, where each CFA number listed in the sources below pulls up the same live dashboard entries CNY Signal reviewed for this story.

Sources and verification

Every figure above is drawn from a New York State government press release, a New York State Consolidated Funding Application project record, the Village of Boonville’s own parks page, the Boonville NY Forward planning committee’s public project list, or the 2020 United States Census as reflected in Boonville’s Wikipedia infobox citation. Calculated figures (per resident total, percentage funded, percentage disbursed, days past the listed completion date) are labeled in the text as CNY Signal’s own calculation. Full source list with URLs appears in Section 5 below.