Deputy Mayor Melkorka Kjarval’s Monthly Reports
April 14th, 2025
Village of Red Hook Communications:
The Spring Seasonal Services Update was sent out to water customers and is available online at: redhookvillage.org/192/Seasonal-Service-Updates. Also the Mayor sent out her latest Newsletter on April 7th, - visit https://www.redhookvillage.org/Newsletter to subscribe or to access an archive of past newsletters.
The Mayor and I reviewed Trustee Bradley-Rickard’s proposed communications policy and we agreed that many of the identified goals outlined align with what the village is already doing, or has been working towards. Some suggested policies & procedures require more consideration. Further discussion was tabled due to other pressing communication requests.
We discussed the Sawkill Collective’s request for a dedicated webpage that houses monthly reports, and relevant updates. I have worked with the Mayor and Village/ Sewer Clerk Jen Cavenaugh to organize and extract monthly reports from meeting minutes and upload and organize information on to a dedicated page titled “Sewer Operations”.
Resident Cat Viega inquired if the Village’s ‘Report a Concern’ form could create automated replies that would be triggered by whichever category the user selects as the ‘indicated problem’ category. I have submitted a Help request to Civic Plus support to see if this feature is supported, as I could not find any mention of it in the Request Tracker help documentation on the CivicPlus support website.
Our IT provider CMI-Tec Inc. of Kingston NY successfully transferred Village emails to the new .gov url. Now Village emails end in “redhookvillage.gov”. We are continuing to navigate the process of getting the redhookvillage.gov address applied to the Village website. We have failed to successfully connect our CivicPlus website platform customer rep with our IT provider, and are hopeful to have an update on that soon. This year there is a plan to update the appearance of the Civicplus website with a full website redesign. As we prepare ourselves for that project, we will be beginning to update and reconfigure existing content and menus to better reflect changes that have happened since the last major organization project took place four years ago.
Village of Red Hook Human Relations Committee: meets every first Thursday of the month at 7:00 pm in the Village Hall conference room. The latest meeting was held on Thursday, April 3nd, 2025.
Mission: “To promote inclusive engagement in village life for all through listening, advocacy, communication, education, and advising local policy.”
Vision: “Red Hook is a place where all who live, work, study, or visit are valued for who they are and are empowered to engage in community life.”
Committee member Linda Duval and I met with Heather Bruegl over zoom on Tuesday, March 25th- we discussed promotion of the meeting in May, her discussions with Historic Red Hook, and her anticipated research schedule when she travels to New York in May.
To that end, Historian Heather Bruegl, in conjunction with the committee, will be holding an Indigenous History Project Gathering, Tuesday May 13th at 7:00PM at the Red Hook Village Hall Courtroom. Join us for a brief Indigenous history presentation, explanation of the project and add any thoughts that you may have! Questions about the event can be sent over email: mkjarval@redhookvillage.gov
At the monthly meeting, in light of all village committees being formally formed by the Village Board, the committee discussed requesting that the committee be renamed to include the word ‘community’ to better reflect the projects that committee has successfully implemented.
For context, the Human Relations Committee was initially launched from the 2021 Police Reform Plan. The committee reviewed the “police reform goals a year out from the plan adoption progress report” (in 2022), created, organized and installed the Inside Out We are Neighbors portrait project exhibit (in 2023), initiated the Red Hook Indigenous History Project (2021-present), and contributed to some of the conversations that led to the eventual coordination of the 2024 warming shelter pilot program at St.Christopher's Church. The committee also was instrumental in the early work of quantifying language access needs in both Library & Village operations in preparation for the grant that the Village Board applied to in 2022.
Also discussed was the suggestion of removing ‘advocacy’, ‘communication’ & ‘education’ from the mission - as those fall outside the role of an advisory committee and attempts in those areas had not successfully been realized, namely a community survey in 2021 did not receive any results, and a bystander brochure which was discussed in 2023, was never developed.
Linda Duval highlighted that being inclusive of everyone in the community has been a central theme in the committee's past work, and that hopefully that would continue to be included in a future mission. Also discussed was the idea of how ‘relationship building' & ‘listening through various formats’ could be somehow part of our mission, although how that is defined and what is useful to the board would be up to the board collectively.
Trustee-elect Frances Uku attended the April meeting as a guest, and suggested the idea of celebrating a community member, and/or senior citizen each month with a profile telling their ‘story’ - and possibilities for collaboration on a project like that. The concept of celebrating individual community member experiences through storytelling has been a repeated theme in discussions that has not yet been pursued.