Glen Cove City Council chooses McNaughton for vacant seat

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After a few weeks of thought, Glen Cove Mayor Tim Tenke and City Council members appointed Donna McNaughton to the council on Tuesday. Members will vote to approve the appointment on Dec. 11.

McNaughton’s tenure will begin Dec. 12. She will succeed Michael Zangari, who re-signed on Nov. 20 because of an illness.

“I’m very happy with it,” McNaughton, 72, said of her appointment. She was one of two candidates who were considered for the post.

McNaughton, an eighth-generation city resident, is a lawyer and has her own practice in Locust Valley, concentrating in real estate, elder law and estate planning. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Empire State College and a law degree from St. John’s University. She is a member of the board and is counsel to the Glen Cove Sage Foundation, and is a former chairwoman of the board of managers for the city’s YMCA.

For the past two and a half years, she has sat on the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, and was appointed its chairwoman when Tenke took office. She said that her experience in the role has prepared her well for a seat on the council.

“I’m just looking forward to being on the council and trying to be fair and do what I can to help,” McNaughton said. “I’m looking forward to serving the people of Glen Cove.”

Councilman Jo-seph Capobianco suggested Mc-Naughton as a candidate the night the council received Zangari’s letter of resignation. Capobianco said that McNaughton was a viable replacement, and passed out copies of her résumé to fellow council members.

Tenke did not call for a vote on McNaughton that night, saying he wanted more time to consider other candidates.

“I do have every intention of swearing her in” next Tuesday, he said.

City bills on the website

Council members are also eyeing a resolution that would allow residents to see how their tax dollars are being spent. If approved, the agreement would provide an “open finance portal,” run through Munis, the city website’s enterprise resource planning software, to provide access to its warrants, or bills.

City Controller Sandra Clarson explained that the website has other Munis modules in place for accounts payable and receivable and the annual budget, and that installing an additional module for the city’s bills would provide greater transparency.

“If you look at the warrants now there’s a hyperlink, but it doesn’t go anywhere because we don’t have that module, so in theory, you would click on that and it would give you the backup to the warrant,” Clarson said referring to individual bills. “It will give you whatever is actually scanned; the invoice, the claim voucher, who signed off, what department, date, time — everything.”

Tenke called the open finance portal “a needed program.” “The public has recently been very involved in our warrants, and I think that this will make it much easier to get the information on their own,” he said.

Purchasing the portal would cost $15,200, and would come out of the city’s contingency funds. If it is approved, Clarson said she would have the module “up and running by mid-February.”