Fact Check: The "$18 Million In Grants" Claim

Supervisor Wojehowski's re-election campaign videos credit him with securing $18 million in grants for Cornwall. His own budget letter, posted to the Town website in January 2026, put the figure at $7 million. Cornwall Truth reviewed state award lists, federal announcements, and four years of the Town's own meeting minutes to see what the public record actually supports.

This is a fact check, not a campaign piece. Where the record supports the Supervisor, we say so below. Where it doesn't, we show the documents. Every source is linked at the bottom so you can check our work.

Cornwall Truth reviewed New York State award announcements, DASNY and DEC award lists, federal press releases, and local news coverage from January 2022 through July 2026. Here is every grant to the Town of Cornwall we could document:

Reaching $16.4 million requires counting everything: the full $4.5 million shared with the Village, the $800,000 that flows to a private hotel developer, congressional earmarks won by two congressmen's offices, a playground grant that Senator Skoufis's office secured, and grants whose applications predate Wojehowski's first day in office — including the $1.7 million sewer grant and the FEMA planning grant. To reach $18 million, the campaign would additionally have to count federal disaster reimbursements, formula highway aid every town receives automatically, or pending applications counted as wins. None of those are competitive grants "secured" by a supervisor. And the pattern repeats at Riverlight Park: the board's July 2023 resolution authorized a park-grant application for up to $500,000 for Rings Pond remediation, ADA sidewalks, bathrooms, and a rain garden. No award of that grant appears anywhere in the public record.

The campaign framing is "I secured." The Town's own records describe a different process — one run by paid professionals.

Cornwall budgeted $10,000 for grant writing in 2025, then transferred an additional $33,000 into that line — $43,000 total — and approved another $3,000 in 2026 for a three-application package. The line item is a recurring budget fixture: when the board trimmed roughly $228,000 from the FY26 tentative budget in October 2025, one of the named cuts was "reducing the money to be spent on hiring grant writers" — meaning the tentative budget carried an even larger grant-writer allocation before residents pushed back. The firm Millennium Strategies handles federal submissions on the Town's behalf. Engineering consultants MHE and MNTM prepared the drainage studies and surveys the applications relied on. When a resident asked at the March 10, 2026 meeting whether the $43,000 figure was correct, the response from the dais, verbatim:

The question was never answered on the record. Professional grant writers applying for competitive state programs is normal municipal practice — that is what the money is for. What the record does not support is presenting the resulting awards as a personal accomplishment while the taxpayer-funded professionals who wrote the applications go unmentioned.

The Hasbrouck Area Drainage Project — the largest infrastructure effort of Wojehowski's tenure — has a paper trail that begins before he was Supervisor. From the Town's own minutes:

Initiated under the prior administration. Studied and surveyed under the prior administration. First grant application authorized under the prior administration. Construction grant denied by FEMA under the current one — and rescued by two congressmen's earmarks. Wojehowski's administration carried the project forward and deserves credit for finishing it. The claim that he secured its funding is not what the minutes show.

There is one program where Cornwall's need is not optional. The Town is under a DEC Consent Order to fix inflow, infiltration, and sanitary sewer overflows in its sewer districts — mandatory work, enforced by the state. The one construction grant Cornwall holds for that work, $1.7 million from the Water Infrastructure Improvement Act, was in hand by February 2022 — the second month of Wojehowski's tenure, for a project the Town's engineer told the board had been underway "since 2017."

Since then, on the Town's own record, the administration has applied to the same program for the Firthcliffe Sewer District three times — and lost three times:

In those exact years, from that exact program: the Town of New Windsor won $14.8 million for its wastewater plant. The Village of South Blooming Grove won $4.7 million for its water system. Cornwall's only win was a $100,000 planning grant — a study.

The consequence is written into the Supervisor's own budget documents. The FY25 budget letter states that special districts see no tax increase "with exception of Cornwall Sewer District 1 due to DEC mandated infrastructure projects." The mandated work is being bonded and billed to sewer ratepayers — because the grants that were supposed to offset it were applied for three times and never won. On the one application where Cornwall had the strongest possible case — a state consent order compelling the work — the administration went zero for three.

The years 2022–2025 saw a historic volume of New York State and federal money pushed to municipalities: NY Forward, DRI, NY SWIMS, WIIA water grants, BRIDGE NY. Cornwall's neighbors won at the same time — several won more:

Note the scale: New Windsor received more in one wastewater grant than the entire portfolio Wojehowski's campaign claims. Highland Falls — population under 4,000 — landed the same $4.5 million NY Forward award as Cornwall. And the $400,000 vacuum-truck grants that New Windsor and Highland Falls won in the 2025 WQIP round? Cornwall was still discussing applying for that same grant at its June 16, 2026 board meeting — a year behind its neighbors.

Winning competitive state grants in this era is not a distinguishing achievement. It is what every municipality with a professional grant writer did — because Albany and Washington spent four years handing out record sums. The question for voters is not whether the money arrived. It is whether "$18 million" is an accurate count, and whether "I secured it" is an accurate description. The record answers both.

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