By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

Visiting Allenstown’s official Web site, a link titled “e-mail addresses” leads you to all of two names ­ Ed Cyr, the town clerk, and David Jodoin, who hasn’t worked in Allenstown for more than a year.

For months, a link to “what’s new,” found on Candia’s official town Web site, leads to a page with only the word “announcements.”

While Town Meeting minutes from 2003 are available on Pembroke’s official Web site, minutes from the 2004, 2005 and 2006 annual meetings are nowhere in sight.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that institutions subsisting on archaic practices like Town Meeting have been slow to embrace the digital age. Yet for many municipalities, often working with default budgets and often with part-time town hall workers, maintaining a functional Web site does not top the list of priorities.

“The main problem smaller towns run into is a lack of consistency in staff that can spend time updating a site,” said Jeanne Brown, a program manager with the Institute for Local Government, State University of New York.

Brown was instrumental six years ago in launching a New York based cooperative, Digital Towpath, which provides small, local governments resources to reside on the Web. Brown said local government officials often approach her, clueless as to what it takes to design or maintain a Web site that functions to aid both government and its citizens.

Yet Brown, who’s also the deputy town clerk for the town of Trenton, N.Y., said local government Web sites are fast becoming the “primary communication points between boards and citizens.”

The Trenton site, which caters to about 4,000 township residents, said Brown, gets about 150 visits per day.

“It’s made our life easier, and it’s made life much easier for so many people who can’t take time off work to stop into our office,” said Brown.

Jodoin, who’s now the town administrator in Hooksett, suggested municipalities throughout New Hampshire are looking to build more effective sites.

“Most places are looking at this as a way to control costs and free up staff time,” he said.

Jodoin said many area communities are experiencing population growth, though staff numbers at local town offices remain fairly constant. If towns offer “paperless” online services, such as vehicle registrations, there could be less strain on municipal workers, Jodoin suggested.

The problem arises when “the small towns don’t have the staff and the expertise,” said Jodoin. “At this point, building (a Web site) is just not a pressing need for some people.”

Time and money

The city of Manchester has a Web site that draws about 40,000 different visitors each month, and the site boasts 14,000 pages of information, said the city’s director of information services, Diane Prew. The city has hired a full-time Web services administrator since 2003, said Prew, and a representative from each of the town’s departments is trained in Web content development.

Prew said the number of online visitors has been consistently growing over the years, as have the number of online services ­ such as online job applications, automatic snow emergency e-mail notifications and vehicle registrations -­ offered to the city’s residents.

Yet it could be some time before smaller towns maintain a Web presence such as Manchester’s. With time and money at a premium in most municipal offices, little of either often gets devoted to municipal Web sites.

Earlier this year, Epsom officials asked voters for $2,000 for Web site design and maintenance.

“Many, many people have asked us for a Web site and more overall communication,” said Epsom Selectman Julie Clermont. Still, the request was soundly denied, by a 600-363 vote.

Few towns have used Epsom’s strategy in making a Web site the subject of a warrant article, and only one of The Hooksett Banner’s six towns has a specific line in the operating budget for Web site design and maintenance.

“It probably should be a regular line in our operating budget, but we were coming off a default budget and we were really hoping to get the new budget passed,” said Clermont.

Most often, municipal Web sites are maintained by community volunteers with limited time, or town hall employees, upon whom the task is thrust.

Such was the case with Allenstown’s Web site, which Jodoin took over after a volunteer who’d created the site five years ago moved out of town.

“I had no idea what I was doing in Allenstown,” Jodoin said of his time as a webmaster. “When you’re learning as you go like that, it’s kind of like hunting and pecking on a keyboard.”

Allenstown Selectmen Chairman Sandy McKenney said officials “are trying very hard” to update the site, though many of its pages seem not to have been updated since early last year.

“It’s not something we’ve been able to put a lot of money into,” said McKenney. “It’s probably not 100 percent the way we want it.”

For about a year, the job of maintaining the town’s site in Hooksett belonged to administrative assistant Evelyn Horn.

“I guess I ended up taking it because no one else wanted it,” said Horn, echoing similar remarks heard from municipal workers throughout the area.

Candia is the only one of the Banner’s six towns that has a specific line in the budget, though the line is unfunded and the town’s site has been fairly stagnant since 2004.

Selectmen have fielded requests from residents to update the town’s site with meeting minutes and meeting schedules, said Selectman Tom Giffen.

“Although we would like to accommodate these requests, we have not been able to allocate the resources,” Giffen said.

Pembroke’s town Web site, which hasn’t changed in design in years, is maintained by the town’s municipal secretary Linda Williams.

Pembroke Town Administrator Troy Brown said about $1,000 a year goes to maintain the site, plus about $2,000 to include listings of all the property valuations in town.

Those are listed in the “announcements and notices” section of the site, though the valuation updates were listed in July, 2004.

Brown said the town receives e-mails on almost a daily basis from residents requesting more information on the site, but the only routinely updated information tends to be meeting minutes and agendas.

Moving forward

“Technology is a wonder, and we’re in that age,” said Jodoin. “I think a lot of smaller communities should probably start embracing that.”

Hooksett already has one of the most functional and frequently updated Web sites in the area, but officials are considering modifying the site’s design, to “make it a little more user friendly,” especially to residents who may not be the most Web savvy.

Jodoin said he hopes the site will ultimately offer an array of online services, like payments and vehicle registrations.

After this year’s rejection at the polls, some Epsom volunteers and town officials formed a Web site committee. On Friday, May 26, the group introduced a new look for Epsom’s site, one aiming “to bring the town into people’s homes,” said Clermont.

“People spend less and less time in town,” said Clermont. “It’s Old Home Day, and that’s about it.”

Clermont said the group is laboring to get more participation from each of the town’s departments, in order to keep the site fresh with updated meeting minutes and announcements.

“It’s going to take a behavior change,” she said. “Different boards will be different boards.”

Auburn similarly has a Web site committee, and the site recently began to offer updated minutes from a number of local boards and committees.

Pembroke’s Troy Brown said both town employees and representatives from a number of town boards have supported updating the Pembroke site to include more content.

“Everyone wants more,” he said. “The more information we have, the more it benefits our staff and the community.”

Brown suggested Web sites are fast becoming a tool for government bodies to disseminate information.

“I’d love to be able to stand up at Town Meeting and say, ‘Go to our Web site, we’ve got all the information there.’”

Kate Hawley, administrative assistant to Auburn’s board of selectmen, took over the duty of maintaining the site two years ago.

Auburn’s site is one of the most frequently updated municipal sites in the area, and now features unapproved meeting minutes.

The town has a three-member Web site committee that meets on an as-needed basis, said Hawley.

Hawley said the town doesn’t regularly track the number of visitors to the site, but she said, “We get a substantial amount ­ probably more than people imagine.”

Giffen said Candia is in the process of forming a volunteer committee to maintain the town’s site, which he suggested could be a good tool for economic development.

Allenstown’s site is being revisited by a new volunteer, said McKenney, and the several pages on the site have recently been updated for the first time in about a year.

“We’re trying to get there little by little,” said McKenney, who’d like to see minutes from all the town’s boards and committees routinely posted on the Web.

“I think the voters would like that,” she said. “They could keep tabs on us ­ which is good.”

Yet as much as some local government officials may lobby for a presence on the Web, the pace at which municipal Web sites play catch-up to the rest of the online world may ultimately be determined by the electorate.

“There are a lot of people who just don’t want to add something like that to the budget,” said Jodoin. “They say, ‘Ah, what do we need that for?’”