IT manager Peter Asp urges Greenburgh to make .gov the town's default for email and website

Peter Asp, who identified himself as the manager of MIS/IT for the town, asked the board to authorize changing the town's default email and website suffix to .gov.

"It's more secured," Asp said, arguing that .gov addresses are managed by the federal government, cannot expire in the same way and offer stronger protections against takeover. "It will never expire, and nobody can ever take it out from underneath us."

Asp said the town would keep the existing .com addresses in perpetuity so emails sent to the .com addresses will still be received during the transition; over time outgoing messages would use the .gov address. He described a phased approach that includes adding a notice in outgoing messages and updating literature, business cards and automated disclaimers to encourage public adoption of .gov addresses.

Board members raised practical concerns about staff contact lists (autofill nicknames), public familiarity with .com, and ensuring that redirection behaves correctly between .gov and .com addresses. Asp said the technical prerequisites are already in place and that staff can draft a resolution to put the change on next week's agenda.

Asp also described plans to redesign the town website (the town's contract allows a redesign every four years) and said staff are testing templates on a private test site. He cautioned that a previously evaluated chatbot could not reliably index the town code, so that functionality is not yet viable.

Next steps: staff will draft a resolution to make .gov the default and bring sample templates for the website redesign to the board for review.