updated Aug. 4, 8:26 a.m.

POTSDAM -- After four years as mayor, Steve Yurgartis will not be seeking a second term in the village’s top post.

“After ten years in local government -- two on the Planning Board, four as a trustee, and now almost four as mayor -- it is probably time for me to turn the page,” Yurgartis, a Democrat, wrote in a Letter to the Editor of NorthCountryNow.com.

“This winter I will turn 62. My list of new things to try is still pretty long. A new chapter calls,” he said in the letter.

He was elected in November 2011 during the same balloting that decided against dissolving the village government, an issue that had simmered in the months before the vote.

Also in that election, Democrat Eleanor Hopke was elected as a first-term trustee, and former trustee and then-Mayor Ron Tischler, who was stepping down from the top post but wanted to stay on the board, was chosen to be a trustee once again.

In addition to the mayor’s post, those two trustee seats are again up for election this November.

In the years since he was first chosen to lead village government, among the issues Yurgartis has struggled with was the matter of the joint participation of village and town governments in a single recreation program, which he wanted to leave entirely to the town. That effort failed.

The four hydropower units run by the village – the two newer ones at the west dam on the Raquette River and the older units at the east dam – continued to be plagued by a variety of problems that had begun before he was mayor. The problems are not completely resolved – there continues to be trouble with getting overhauled parts for the east dam units – but the new turbines finally appear to be running smoothly after years of delays.

Yurgartis went so far as to use a semester’s sabbatical from his job as a professor at Clarkson University to try and work through some of the hydropower problems. Meanwhile the costs of the projects, which originally were planned to provide a revenue stream for the village, have strained the already difficult budget problems the village faces.

“It was a tough decision for me” not to run again, but Yurgartis remains upbeat.

“It’s been a good run,” he said last week. “I’ve still got some things on that list to do, or at least try while there’s time.”