Client Profile: Town of Shelter Island, NY

Shelter Island, NY is a community with 2,500 year-round residents.

Challenge

The Town issues permits for boats that are regularly moored in town. The Town had a simple Microsoft Access database that was used by the Town Clerk’s office to keep track of issued permits, but this database was not available across Town Departments and was not integrated with the workflow in the Town Clerk’s office. The result was that the database provided little productivity savings.

Solution

Fuss & O’Neill Technologies (fandotech) developed a web-based Mooring Permit System, and integrated this system with fandotech’s web-based mapping product, Community Explorer Online. These two web sites are hosted by fandotech in its Manchester, CT data center. Both systems are password protected, ensuring that access is provided only to authorized Town staff.

• Flexible permit search capabilities, allowing searches based on permit information, owner information, mooring information, and boat information.
• Validation of data entry against Town requirements, including the following:
  • A person can have only one riparian mooring at a time.
  • A mooring can only be assigned to one permit at a time.
  • Latitude and longitude coordinates must be within town boundaries.
• Storage of a digital photos for each boat.
• Allows Harbor Masters to enter information about a mooring’s actual coordinates, the date of the measurement, and additional comments.
• Displays permitted and actual mooring coordinates on a map of the Town, color-coded based upon the marina associated with each mooring. The map can show owner names, boat names, and/or permit numbers next to each mooring. The map also connects the permitted and actual locations with an arrow that shows the bearing and distance between the two locations.
• Clicking on amooring on themap displays information about the associated permits.
• When viewing information about any permit, there are links to view the permitted location and actual location on the map.
• Permit data can be exported into a format that can be used by Microsoft Word’s mail-merge tool, allowing easy generation of permit renewal notices.

Key Benefits

All necessary Town staff can access to mooring permit information, from Town facilities or even out on the water. The hosted solution minimizes the impact on the Town’s limited IT resources, requiring no software installation or updates.

Town Clerk Benefits

• Ability to list available moorings.
• Reduction in the effort required to generate renewal notices Reduction in data entry effort, by sharing owner data, mooring data, and boat data between permits.
• Improvement in data quality through the use of drop-down lists, data validation, and in visualization of mooring locations on a map.

Harbor Master Benefits

• Ability to verify the boat that should be moored at any location Ability to determine where a boat should be, based on its name, registration number, or Hull ID.
• Improved mooring dispute resolution, by providing the distance and bearing that each mooring needs to be moved to be at its permitted location.