Intern documents address corrections, migrates town site to .gov and builds online forms

Sam Bouchard, a summer intern working with Bluff administration, presented a progress report to the council on Aug. 5 covering addressing, the town website and records migration.

Bouchard said he entered more than 70 residential addresses and roughly 175 hotel/room units into the state ArcGIS addressing system, verified existing points and identified about 22 addresses with incorrect house numbers. "I identified about 22 incorrect addresses," Bouchard said, adding he created an address manual for internal use. Town staff said the corrected data is already in the state system and will be easier for dispatchers and emergency responders to use.

On websites, Bouchard and staff completed a transition of the town domain from .org to townofbluffutah.gov and moved hosting to a consolidated account. He said he and staff implemented a new WordPress theme, reorganized pages (including cemetery and airport pages), and built 13 Express online forms intended to replace PDF forms and to integrate with an online bill‑pay system.

Erin Nelson, the town manager, said the addressing work "ties directly into sustainable town government" and noted the records will make emergency response and internal workflows faster. Nelson also said the state ArcGIS system lacks a discrete field for "plus codes," so staff are using note fields for the short term and pursuing integration options with dispatch and other systems.

Bouchard also migrated planning and zoning files from Google Drive to OneDrive and prepared a user guide for staff. Council members praised the intern for producing documentation that will streamline future administrative tasks.

Next steps: staff will contact about 20 property owners with incorrect numbers to propose corrected house numbers, pursue future options to export state addressing data into Diamond Maps, and finish linking online forms to the new payment portal.