NIVERVILLE–The Kinderhook Town Board got a look at the new town website at the board’s regular monthly meeting this week. Former board member Peter Bujanow presented the website that he has been working on with designers from Virtual Towns and Schools for the last 8 months.
Mr. Bujanow told the board members at the Monday, June 11 meeting that the website is scheduled to go live on Friday, June 15. “My personal opinion: it looks better than the last one,” he told the board, and board members agreed.
Not only will the new website have pictures of the town its two villages, it will also offer many more links to government offices and important applications that residents can download. There will be tabs on the homepage for meeting agendas and minutes, the town codes and comprehensive plan, as well as a calendar of events.
And there will be a page that links to local businesses and sites in the area. “It will give you ideas that you didn’t even know were there,” Mr. Bujanow said of the links.
The cost of the maintaining the website will remain the same, at $2400 a year, through Virtual Towns and Schools, which is based in Clifton Park. Mr. Bujanow volunteered his time to help design the new site and said that Virtual would not charge anything for the new design.
He proposed changing the website when he was still on the board in October of 2011 before he lost his seat in November. He was subsequently appointed by Supervisor Pat Grattan to head up the website redesign. Mr. Bujanow said he sat down with all different offices in the town and board chairpersons to get ideas for the new website and he said the board will continue to make changes even as the site goes live this week.
Along with the new website Mr. Grattan asked the board to adopt a motion to put tax bills online. He said Kinderhook was one of two or three towns that did not already have the bills available online. Mr. Grattan said it would cost the town a onetime start-up fee of $1,500 and then a yearly fee of $350.
“It will make the bills way more accessible,” Mr. Grattan told the board. The motion passed unanimously.
Also at the meeting:
•The board also passed a motion to make Rensselaer County Humane Society a site for the animal control officers to take stray pets. Mr. Grattan said that the hours at Woodhill, where the animals are taken now, are limited, and that the Columbia County Humane Society is not available to the town. Rensselaer is a non-profit, no-kill shelter that is open 24 hours and meets all the state and federal approvals. It costs $20 a day to board the dogs there, which Mr. Grattan said was comparable to Woodhill.
•Town Planning Board Chairman Bob Cramer sent a letter to the board and spoke at the meeting about requesting bids for the position of town engineer. Mr. Cramer pointed out that Pat Prendergast, the current town engineer lives in the town and “has done an absolutely stupendous job for us.” Mr. Cramer said that changing engineers now would cause a great deal of disruption and asked the board to wait until the fall, when the board is crafting the new budget, to request bids for the job.
The next town board meeting will be Monday, July 9 at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall in Niverville. The Town Board will take over the lease of the Martin H. Glynn School in Valatie after voters approved that move in the recent school district election, but Mr. Grattan said he did not know when the town hall would move to that space.
To contact reporter Emilia Teasdale email eteasdale@columbiapaper.com.
