Greenport awarded grant to clean up, organize village records

The Village of Greenport has been working over the last few years to clean up its old, inactive records and improve its organization.

Mayor Kevin Stuessi announced at the Aug. 21 board of trustees work session that the village has been awarded a $149,531 state grant to continue that work for the next year, along with some new cabinetry and custom shelving.

“Over the course of the last year, the clerk’s office team, led by Candace [Hall], along with Deputy Clerk Jeanmarie [Oddon] … have spent tremendous time, energy and effort going through all of the files there,” said Mr. Stuessi. “There was significant work in reorganizing things and getting files in places where we could find them, making things much more accessible.”

The grant was awarded through the New York State Archives’ Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund. Individual municipalities are typically only eligible for $75,000 through the grant, but since Greenport has a housing department, which is viewed as its own entity, the village was eligible for nearly double, just under the possible maximum of $150,000. 

Applicants can put in for the grants in several project categories, including disaster management, document conversion and access, file management, historical records and inactive records. Greenport was awarded for the last of which, and while this project is not to completely digitize, it will allow them to move in that direction.

“This is a process that will get us to the point where we can digitize; it’s what we have to do beforehand. Right now, we’re in the process of organizing and getting rid of inactive records,” said Ms. Hall, the village’s clerk. “When I first got here, the deputy clerk and I spoke about the condition of the records here, and within a month of starting, called the State Archives, and they started to come out. We’ve gotten rid of about 300 boxes so far that the state takes for free. Everything that we’ve done so far didn’t cost the village any extra money.”

Inactive records that the village has been removing have been a mix of everything. They’ve included multiple years of FOIL requests, financial reporting from the 1990s, mooring reservation receipts for Mitchell Park, decades-old cash payment receipts, applications for birth and death records, and more. To help sort through things, the village adopted the state archives’ “suggested retention schedule,” which dictates how long different types of documents need to be kept for. 

The removed records are being recycled to make toilet paper for state parks. 

Ms. Hall said the village has documents that apply to any time frame set by the retention schedule — from three months to six months to indefinite to permanent. She and the village have been working directly with a woman-owned business to help go through the records as well, as part of the state archives’ Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise Compliance program. 

Ms. Hall estimates that there are still a few hundred boxes to go. 

“The more organized Village Hall is, the better we’re able to serve our community, and that crosses all departments,” said Ms. Hall. “There’s a lot of history within this building, and if we have all that stuff organized, we can better serve our community. There are so many different reasons why people need these records, and it’s all public record, so people should be able to have easy access.”

It was also announced at the work session that, due to state law, the village’s website can no longer be villageofgreenport.org, because it has to end in “.gov.” The website has to have the new domain by February 2026, but the hope is that the shift is completed by the end of this year. Additionally, the meeting management software that the village uses to create agendas will reach its end-of-service time in September and its end-of-life within the next two years. The village plans to migrate to the same company’s new software.