The Town of Seabrook has gone paperless for Board of Selectmen meetings, allowing us to transmit data, including backup data, to the Board of Selectmen more efficiently, with significantly less staff time, paper, and copying costs for the Town. With the price of paper rising, and the Town already deploying tablets within our asset management program, we had the ability to provide tablets for meeting access to the materials (agenda and backup) for the Board. This access is not limited to the tablets, which primarily reside in Town Hall. Access to the intranet is available through desktops and laptops as well, giving the Board an ability to view agendas, past and present, by accessing the site through their own computers.

While we looked at several alternatives as we approached this issue, including agenda software, we opted to build an intranet with password access, and multiple layers to it, allowing us to scale the project to other Boards. We currently have tabs for Planning and Zoning, and will have full employee access for information postings (internal bulletin board) very soon.

While access to the current agenda is the main purpose of this effort we felt it important to facilitate Board access to prior meetings, including backup, in order to allow research, to be able to retrieve older documents without an endless paper chase, and to be able to view the video of the meeting. We have connected the intranet with our meeting video retention software, providing a direct link on the agenda page to the meeting video. Chasing video requests internally is now a thing of the past.

My thanks to IT Director Brian Murphy, who worked long and hard, and skillfully, on this project. My thanks to Deputy Town Manager Kelly O’Connor, who kept the work flow on schedule, and thanks also to Project Clerk Kelsey Mae Boscoe, who is now setting up the online agendas and backup. Great team effort.

An especially big thank you to the Board of Selectmen who really pushed for the project, and looked after it frequently. They recognized the financial benefits to the Town, and were invested heavily in the project.

The link to the media coverage here.