The Village of Montgomery board revealed promising updates during its May 21 meeting, including an upcoming public hearing for the water moratorium and an upgrade to the police department’s surveillance thanks to a newly awarded grant.

The meeting opened with public comments from James Kiernan, a resident who recently applied for village trustee before the board appointed Randy Wilbur to the position. Kiernan thanked the board for interviewing him and asserted that Wilbur was the ideal candidate given his background and current output.

“I appreciate the time you took to interview me. I know I’m not anyone who’s been in the local scene for too long, so I appreciate that,” Kiernan said. “I did want to congratulate Trustee Wilbur for being the one chosen. I’ve been encouraged by what you’ve been doing so far. I know you’ve been meeting with some constituents and that’s a very encouraging sign. I look forward to what you’re going to do and I think the board got the better man.”

Kiernan also suggested that board meetings should take place at the Montgomery Senior Center, as the building can hold more people and accommodate seniors better.

“I think we need to move to the senior center from where we are now. It’s getting more busy, more crowded, and older people would like to come,” he continued. “They can’t climb these stairs, and we have a building that’s less than a mile away that we can use.”

Don Berger, a fellow resident, expressed discontent with the current rules for public comment and felt that the board could refine them. He questioned why residents must request to speak at a given meeting by Wednesday but receive the agenda on Monday, a day before the meeting.

“The problem with the way you set this up Mike is that you’ve made no rules or guidelines about how we go about doing this. For instance, when Tina (the village clerk) mentioned that we have to have our things in by Wednesday, we don’t get the agenda by Monday,” Berger said. “How can we speak on the agenda if we’re not getting the agenda until Monday and you’re asking us to be on the request to be on the board five days prior to that?”

Following public comment, the board scheduled a public hearing on June 13 at 6 p.m. for extending the village’s water moratorium, which will expire on June 13. While the board did not confirm the extension’s length, Trustee Kevin Conero proposed that six months would be adequate.

“The moratorium currently expires on June 19, so if you’re going to extend the moratorium, you need to have it filed in Albany by June 19. So we have time to work on that and schedule a public hearing,” said William Frank, the village attorney.

Later in the meeting, Mayor Mike Hembury and Chief William Herlihy announced that the village’s police department received $200,000 from a police enforcement technology grant last Friday, May 24. The department will use the funds to install new cameras and license plate readers in the village and Veterans Memorial Park.

“I sat down with Sergeant Werner and we started thinking about what we would want; we came up with a bunch of cameras that we were looking at, mostly in the downtown area,” Herlihy explained. “We wanted cameras that would survey all the parkland areas for us as well as the playgrounds and things like that. In addition, we were looking for license plate readers that we have in fixed positions in our village.”