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HANOVER Website is way behind the times

Paul Wolf, president for the New York Coalition For Open Government, has a consistent message for elected leaders: be more transparent about what you are doing with taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately, even with the technological advances, there are plenty of instances where information is not as accessible as it needs to be.

Earlier this week, Wolf called out the town of Hanover for its web site, which appears to take Internet users back to the stone ages. While some information regarding upcoming meetings and forms are available, other simple pieces — such as specific names — are not.

Hanover, which has a population of more than 7,000, is failing its residents by not having a site that is regularly updated. For its part, the town is working to better the product.

“We are currently building our website. It’s not complete,” said Tim Crino, town clerk. “We have a webmaster building it for us now. … We don’t even have control of it right now because the webmaster is adding and subtracting things at this point. Hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll have control of it so we can start adding things to it.”

What is most disappointing, however, is the web site is almost no better today than it was four months ago when this newspaper was seeking information regarding earlier board meetings. Minutes still are not available on the site — and that is something that is fairly easy to add.

“There is no practicable reason as to why meeting documents cannot be scanned and posted online prior to a meeting,” Wolf said. We wholeheartedly agree.

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