Web site still in sight for village of Millerton

MILLERTON — The village is ready to ride the wave and surf the Internet with its very own Web page... any day now... really.

According to village Trustee Yosh Schulman, the holdup is not due to any slackness on the village’s part. It’s due, in large measure, to him.

"The bottleneck has been me, as far as getting the paperwork in place," he said this week, nearly one year after the Web Site Committee’s inaugural meeting (held in September 2007). "I’ve just been dealing with life."

Schulman and his wife, Nili, are the proud parents of Tal, now 9 months old. That’s reason enough for the delay in the mind of Mayor John Scutieri.

"He’s very busy, and I don’t expect somebody who sits on the board to do it when we can turn to an outside contractor," Scutieri said. "I think it looks to me that we might be going in that direction, of course with Yosh’s guidance. It’s just a lot more than I would expect a Village Board member to do, but I think it was wonderful of Yosh to help. He has such an incredible amount of information, and for him to get us to this point was priceless."

However, Schulman has not abandoned his duties altogether. When the idea was first proposed at a Village Board meeting last year he quickly secured the domain name villageofmillerton.com. Since then he’s in talks with a local Web designer to possibly come on board with the project. The first step will be to get funding, ideally through a grant with the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. The village trustee is hoping for roughly $1,500 to get the page up and started.

"That’s a good amount. I would say $1,500 is kind of a standard amount for getting a Web site running and getting things in place," he said. "That includes doing maintenance on the site and updates and changes. Either that or teaching somebody how to do the updates. Both are time-involved."

Once completed, the municipal Web site will be a mecca of information, offering phone numbers, hours of operation for village officials and departments, schedules for meetings and special events, committee information, links to other area resources (like the library, historical society, etc.) and other key bits of information. Ultimately the Village Board wants to post the municipal code book on the Web, as well as minutes to its meetings. It will also offer a calendar, which is already up and running, for people in the community to make use of. In fact, according to Schulman, the Web site already exists, it just needs to be filled out.

"We own the domain name, and there are some functions and features that are in place," he said. "If you go to calendar.villageofmillerton.com the calendar can be viewed there."

To include an event on the calendar, however, one needs to contact Schulman for instructions on how to log in and upload information. To do so send an e-mail to yosh@villageofmillerton.com.

The goal behind all of this work, Schulman said, is simple: "To provide information to the villagers that they need and connect the village of Millerton to the larger community via the Web."

Meanwhile, if anyone has suggestions for the Web site, or photos they want to contribute, contact Schulman at the aforementioned e-mail address.

The village trustee is hopeful the site will be completed in the near future. The original end date was February of this year, but those plans were interrupted by "life," according to Schulman.

"Our go point is already gone, so if we could get money in place for a Web master it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to fill in the content and get the site up," he said. "I would like it done as soon as possible."