First, the bad news.
It took me two times to get it right – the online registration system offered by the town for renewal of our mooring permits. Click here for Greenwich Time article
The online mooring site was slowed to a crawl when I attempted to use it. And there was some confusion as to which buttons to hit. I’m not sure whether it was a DNS (domain name system) problem on my end or a problem with the site. But a nice man named Brad Hurley at FandOTech, the Manchester vendor for onlinemooring.com, got the problems resolved after I called the company.
In the end, it was a rush to be able to do everything online, and I believe this is where the town needs to go for everything – from beach cards to golf and tennis permits – but more on that later.
One precaution: Get your paperwork in order before sitting down in front of the computer. You will need copies of your registration and insurance detail page. You also will be asked for information such as length, beam, displacement, draft – information that I had to dig up from my files. Also, if you have no ability to scan your registration and insurance pages into images to be uploaded, you will not be able to complete this online. Luckily, I have a scanner and was able to upload the images.
The first time I registered, the application was completed but without a payment option. Brad told me that I had filled out an application for a new permit and not a renewal. He erased my first attempt, and I had to do it a second time. The good news though was that the system had saved all my entries so I didn’t have to start from the beginning.
I was charged a fee of $3.55 to pay by credit card online. The total renewal fee was $103.55. I’m still not happy about the increase in mooring fees from $35 two years ago to $100, and I am still not clear how all this extra cash is being used.
But the online registration did work and I prefer it to the old system. I believe the town should consider using the same technology platform for all our permit registrations – the concept of a “single sign-on” for all things Greenwich – from our beach permit, to library cards, to dump permits, to golf and tennis permits.
Brad Hurley at FandOTech said the company is providing exactly such a service for eight New England towns, including Jamestown, R.I. and Waterford, CT.
Imagine being able to scan your utility bills into this system and be able to claim your residency once a year to be used for multiple departments. And I would charge for this service so that the town does not have to pay it through public coffers. Would you pay for this convenience? I know I would.
Good point, that can’t be made enough, is that the Town needs to simplify things. My favorite example is my mother and father’s beach cards. For a time, myself, my wife, my mother and my father all “owned” our house. We were all listed on the deed and the property tax bills. I paid all the bills for the house, but we had to put this utility in my name, that one in my wife’s, another in my father’s and yet another in my mother’s: so we could all get beach cards. Really? How ridiculous is that. Not to mention the difficulty caused by my mother letting her driver’s license lapse (she was in a wheelchair), so she needed something else. Thank God they were seniors, so we didn’t have to go through this every year.
Keep pounding this issue until the person at Town Hall who sits around thinking of ways to make using Town services more difficult is fired, or at least instructed to think differently.
- John
Comment by John Bowman — March 24th, 2010 @ 10:19 pm
Lincoln, thanks for the explanation. I’ve been in avoidance of logging on for fear of making an error and freezing my (re)application. I agree that online registrations and other processing needs work well once the kinks are worked out. While I recognize that mooring and facilities uses fall under different departments, I don’t think the two processes should have such a completely parallel set of application channels. Coastal advisory reps are adamant the they should remain separate, but everything one does for moorings is done again for the facilities use boating passes without the online convenience (at least as far as I have discerned). Registration, yes, insurance yes, boat data, yes. To me there’s no digital/technical impediment to distributing the information to the two departments. Third party software under contract to the town for moorings could be required to forward the basic information to an archive for retrieval, as needed.
Comment by Jay Louden — March 28th, 2010 @ 10:34 am
Lincoln, thank you for sharing your experience using the Online Mooring web site, and for your kind words about me. We want everyone to have a completely positive experience with the web site, and are always trying to make improvements to the site based on feedback from people like yourself. I hope you like things even better next year when you renew your mooring permit!
Comment by Brad Hurley — March 29th, 2010 @ 4:54 pm