Whether or not they know her name, it’s likely that every resident of the Village of Westbury has something to thank clerk-treasurer Chrissy Kiernan for.
“I’m definitely a people person,” Kiernan, 40, said on why she loves clerk and local government work. “I also just have a passion for performance measurement and management and strategic planning. I love the treasury budgeting side. I love efficiency. I love automating processes.”
Kiernan, who’s been in local government for roughly two decades, has supported Westbury’s daily functions since 2022.
Notably, during her time in the village, she’s helped automate and integrate more efficient technology into previously pen-and-paper processes, including the creation of a new financial services software for smoother and speedier work order processing, licensing, permitting and code enforcement, which is being rolled out.
“I’m excited for it, especially the code enforcement, which is a long time coming,” she continued, her passion for her profession clear. “This will allow residents or permittees to fill out information online, as opposed to coming in, and they can check the status of their permits and see in real time where it’s at.”
“This makes it more open for residents to engage with us.” Kiernan continued. “It also gives the supervisors and me the ability to have metrics on different things, like complaints or service requests that come in, so we can have our workflow in that way, and it’s not just in someone’s head.”
She’s also responsible for tax collection, grant applications and public works contracts, as well as supporting budget drafting, managing village department heads, improving the village’s phone and radio systems, updating the village website to make it more user-friendly and helping with the Maple Union Streetscape project, which improved pedestrian conditions on the street. For many residents, she’s the first voice they hear when they call the village for help.
“It’s not just about the back-end stuff and the department meetings and all that. It’s also about the residents,” she said. “I love people. I want people to leave my office and feel like they were listened to and heard. I’m very honest with people. I don’t placate people’s concerns. We do our best we can with the staffing that we have to facilitate the different requests that come in.”
Before serving the Village of Westbury, Kiernan worked in state government, holding positions on the staff of state Sen. José M. Serrano, who represents parts of Manhattan and The Bronx and state Sen. Craig M. Johnson, until he lost to state Sen. Jack Martins.
After Johnson lost, she decided to try something different and found herself in a fundraising role for the Alan T. Brown Foundation, a city charity supporting people with paralysis. But after a few years, she felt called back to local government.
“I just really missed the whole local government vibe,” Kiernan said. “So, I started to put my resume out. I think I actually sent it cold to 64 municipalities in Nassau.”
She got a call back from Baxter Estates and turned the page into her chapter as a Long Island village clerk.
Kiernan said her work there shaped her into the clerk she is today. The small staff and old-school pen-and-paper systems taught her a lot about each village department and gave her experience automating processes, she said.
“I think that experience made me more respected with my department heads when I came here because I’m able to understand what their day looks like, because I was there,” she said. “When it snowed, I was the person answering the call and having the plow go out. So, my public works head knows I get it. Same thing with building permits, when someone’s calling and they’re asking for a status, and requests are piling up. I try to help and get buy-in from everyone.”
In Westbury, she said something she likes is that every day is different. For example, right now in June, Kiernan’s ramping up tax collection, as residents have between June 1 and July 1 to pay their village taxes, which they can do in person or online.
“We wear a lot of hats as village clerk-treasurers. We have to have a little bit of knowledge in every single area, from street lighting to road work to tax to understanding how to read an audit to the many reports that are required by the state,” Kiernan said. “We have civil service requirements. We process death certificates. We respond to constituent inquiries. We really are a jack of all trades.”
She holds an undergraduate degree from SUNY Albany and a master’s in public administration from New York University, where she attended when the program was the second-best in the world.
Her passion for clerking and local government has led her to leadership positions in the field, including as the secretary for the Long Island Village Clerks and Treasurers Association, the chair of the audit committee for the New York State Association of City and Village Clerks and the secretary treasurer of the New York State Society of Municipal Finance Officers.
Originally from New Hyde Park, Kiernan now lives in Massapequa Park with her two children, ages four and seven. When she’s not clerking, she said she’s at their baseball games and practices, standing between the adjacent fields they play on.
She’s also a class mom, a Girl Scout troop leader, a Sunday school teacher and a dog mom to Lightning, her rescue beagle.
