Mineola’s village clerk has his whole heart in the job.
Bryan Rivera, who’s been clerking on Long Island for over a decade, has spent a little over three of those years in Mineola. He said it’s simply a desire to do good public service and help others that’s kept him in the job.
“I like helping people,” Rivera said. “It’s my favorite part of the job. I like the satisfaction of getting things done right.”
Rivera has been clerking in Mineola the whole time that Paul Pereira has been the village’s mayor. In that span, he helped the village start an annual event series, successfully apply for the New York Forward Grant, which provided the village with $4.5 million to revitalize its downtown, and a grant to renovate the village’s community center and digitize village payments.
“My role really as a village clerk is to make sure that the mayor and the board’s vision gets implemented,” Rivera said. “These are all things that the mayor and the board want to get done. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Man, how do we do it?’ But we get it done,” he said, laughing.
He said he credits his father’s love of the news when he was younger as what initially ignited his interest in public service.
“When I was young, my dad would always watch the news in the evening. It was always the six o’clock news,” Rivera said. “I think that’s where I got my interest in government. As I got older, I found that government should be a way to help people.”
He said those nightly news broadcasts with his dad are what motivated him to seek undergraduate degrees in political science and public administration and jobs in governmental administration.
As he sees it, he said, there’s a political side to government and a governing side. He loves the work that the governing side does.
“The political side is not as much fun or as interesting or as helpful to people as the governing side,” Rivera said. “As boring as it may seem, local government is your closest and most intimate form of interaction with your government, because we handle everything from your streets to plowing to zoning and building codes to all the different community events to paying your taxes to your water.”
“If we do our jobs right, if we do our jobs well, it keeps people’s taxes down, and we also give them things to do and to enjoy, a good quality of life and good, easy interactions, when they ask for help,” he continued. “I find I get satisfaction in knowing that we help people. That’s really what keeps me going.”
Prior to serving Mineola, Rivera was the deputy clerk for the Village of Great Neck for about 2 1/2 years and the clerk-treasurer for the Village of Roslyn Estates for over four years. Before he was a Long Island clerk, he was living in his home borough of Queens, where he worked as a community liaison for then-New York City Council Member Tony Avella and then-State Assembly Member Mark Weprin.
Rivera said starting to clerk for smaller villages like Roslyn, where there are under 2,000 residents, and Great Neck, where there are just over 1,000, and progressively moving to larger ones, like Mineola, where over 21,000 people call home, has helped him develop his craft and made him into the capable clerk he is today.
“The village clerk job is the village clerk job in every village. There’s still the same paperwork that you have to do, the same responsibilities: collect taxes, do the budget,” Rivera said.
He said working in smaller villages with fewer staff caused him to quickly learn how to handle a wide array of responsibilities, lessons he passes along to members of his current staff and uses to help him manage the longer list of things going on in Mineola.
“I think I’m better off for learning from every place where I was before. I learned something in each that helped me grow,” Rivera continued. “You take those things that you learn and you grow from them and pass them along to other people.”
Rivera said his days are always different. Sometimes he’s checking in on different village departments, sometimes he’s collecting taxes, sometimes he’s helping resolve resident complaints.
“Something I’m proudest of is when people come to village hall, they have a good interaction,” Rivera said. “Village Hall should be a place where you’re not afraid to come. It should be the place where you come if you need some help, whatever it is.”
Rivera said he encourages residents to call if there’s anything they think the village can help them with. He can be reached by calling the village office at 516-746-0750.
