Town web site a 'virtual' certainty in near future
Published on March 29th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - Past deadline, over budget, and nowhere near complete, it has been Stoneham's very own little virtual big dig for years.
But with the determined help of Selectman George Seibold, Town Counsel Bill Solomon, Town Treasurer Thomas Cicatelli and Town Clerk John Hanright, Stoneham's much heralded website is finally expected to be available to citizens this Friday.
The domain name will be www.stoneham-ma.gov.
According to town officials, Seibold received the permission from fellow board members late last fall to jump-start the stalled-out work on the website, which was previously being created under the direction of former Town Planner Michael Gallerani.
Volunteering for the task, Solomon suspected that he could negotiate with Stoneham's cable providers to fund the project, as the license agreements do include payments for Internet infrastructure and support needs.
"I thought, 'Lets move forward with this. We told the people this was going to happen, so let's go,'" Seibold recalled. "I think this has been a long time coming. We've been working on this since last November."
"Together with George Seibold, we found the company. We're also funding the set-up cost of it from RCN cable funds. We felt that clearly, someone had to step up and make this happen," Solomon would comment in a separate interview.
Quite a few years back, the former Town Planner secured approximately $20,000 for the municipal website. But nearly two years ago, that funding completely dried-up, and all progress on the site came to a halt.
What was left was a skeleton webpage with a quite a few photos posted, but little to no information about the town. In fact, quite a few of the pages simply read, 'Under Construction' when clicked on.
Fighting a losing battle as he split his duties between the Town Treasurer's office and as the town's "computer guy", Cicatelli unsuccessfully attempted to rejuvenate the far-from-complete project over the past few years.
In turn inheriting the project from Cicatelli - who did quite a bit of work toward the new website himself, say town officials - Seibold and Solomon decided to start the website completely over from scratch.
And not only was the website completed in four months - less than a quarter of the time spent on the webpage to that date - but Seibold and Solomon were able to accomplish the feat at less than half of the cost that had previously been poured into the project.
"The cost was a really fair price for designing, setting-up, and monitoring the website with us," said Solomon of the price offered by Virtual Town Hall, a Maine-based company.
"They have a whole bunch of responsibilities besides just setting it up," the Town Counsel added, saying the final $9,300 price-tag includes maintenance and support services for the webpage during the next year. "This is a continual process for them, not just designing something and then leaving."
Given the history of the long overdue webpage, it might be difficult to believe that the virtual page is days away from completion.
But judging by a show-and-tell offered to The Stoneham Independent by a quite animated and excited Town Clerk, the process has come quite a long way from the blank or incomplete website that existed just a few months prior.
"This is something I've been looking forward to since I was first elected in 1998, so we could share information with the residents," said Hanright, as he clicked onto several of the departmental pages on the virtual site.
"It's a great tool for anybody who wants to find out about the process, really. Finally after all these years, the residents of Stoneham and those outside of Stoneham can now go right online and communicate with the town," the Town Clerk added.
Including a posted schedule of all the current meetings being held by elected and appointed boards, the website will also include links so that residents can regularly download the minutes of those meetings.
On his own department page, the Town Clerk has also uploaded the minutes from every single Town Meeting since he assumed his position, along with the results from each general election.
"There's also a fee schedule on there an from the forms section, residents will be able to download dog licenses, marriage certificates, death certificates and birth certificates," Hanright explained. "So now they'll be able to download and fill out the information and send a check."
According to Seibold and Hanright, the website should greatly assist an understaffed Town Hall by cutting down on foot traffic and phone calls from citizens seeking out basic information or forms from municipal departments.
And to ensure that the information remains regularly updated, ten registered users will be charged with uploading changes to schedules, forms, town bylaws, or departmental procedures.
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