MARTINSBURG — Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Karl Schultz, came to the Eastern Panhandle for a tour of the three Coast Guard offices in the Eastern Panhandle on Friday.
For Capito, the visit offered an opportunity to display the accomplishments of the West Virginian Coast Guard offices. The visit enabled Schultz to observe the work being done at each facility, and he thanked staff for their hard work.
“It’s really good to hear about what’s going on,” Schultz said. “We have some challenges here to upgrade IT type stuff in the future, so it’s always good to hear from the people who do the work.”
According to Schultz, the U.S. Coast Guard, as an agency, has a lot of old IT infrastructure. The National Maritime Center in Martinsburg would also benefit from a technological update, according to Captain Kirsten Martin, commanding officer of the National Maritime Center.
Currently, Martin said the NMC runs primarily on paper-based documents and processing. During the tour of the facility, Martin took Schultz and Capito through the on-site document storage and records room.
The file storage room is lined with shelves and shelves of alphabetized paper records. Martin joked that the NMC file system is still in the 1940s, and Michael Washburn, chief of the Mariner Information Division, said the facility is “trapped in a paper world.”
Capito asked about ways the NMC could potentially update the system. Washburn replied that the Coast Guard is currently exploring options for image recording and digitizing records, but the current system is “not really designed for that.”
On a national scale, Schultz said the U.S. Coast Guard is having conversations about technological updates across the board.
“We have to have a plan, and I would say we’re building the plan about how we get to step up and catch up,” Schultz said. “We have a lot of old IT infrastructure across the Coast Guard. So this is one place where we could step forward whether it’s cloud based or something – we could probably tie their systems into the support of the verified community. (An update) is coming, I would say.”
The IT update is also in line with Capito’s mission to bring better, stronger connectivity to West Virginia.
“Obviously, in order for (the NMC) to fully digitize, we’ve gotta have the infrastructure,” Capito said. “I’m sure we do in terms of internet capabilities in this building, but it would certainly be nice when we’re asking folks from the Coast Guard and our contractors to come out and work here that they could enjoy the same connectivity when they go home in the evenings, and there are some challenges in and around this area.”
According to Washburn, the Coast Guard is developing a $4 million resource proposal for fiscal year 2021 to develop a new IT system for the Martinsburg National Maritime Center.
Washburn said the proposal is not a guarantee of funds, but it is a budgetary request to be considered.
“(The proposal) is essentially a place marker saying we would like to allocate so much to build new IT system for the National Maritime Center. (The $4 million request) might just cover initial development and deployment, but that’s the number they’re throwing around,” Washburn said.
During the tour, Martin also explained the primary duties and functions of the NMC.
According to Martin and Anne Seither, deputy director of the National Maritime Center, the Martinsburg Coast Guard office is the only one of its kind.
The NMC prints and issues all of the Merchant Mariner Credentials for qualified civilian mariners. Approximately 50,000-60,000 passport-like credentials are generated annually on three highly specialized printers in the Martinsburg office.
As part of the credential issuing process, Martin said an on-staff doctor and three physician’s assistants oversee the medical health screening and evaluation portion of the application approval process. The NMC Safety and Suitability department evaluates and investigates the background of each applicant before issuing credentials as well.
The building also houses a customer call center to field calls about merchant mariner application questions, application status queries, complaints and other issues.
In addition, the NMC in Martinsburg evaluates and approves more than 3,000 merchant mariner courses approximately once every five years. Martin said the courses range from four year programs with 95,000 pages of training material to shorter courses, like CPR.
The tour also took Schultz and Capito to the National Vessel Documentation Center in Falling Waters and the U.S. Coast Guard Operations Systems Center in Kearneysville – which is where all of the U.S. Coast Guard IT systems and computer servers are housed and maintained.
They were scheduled to visit the Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit in Huntington on Friday, as well.
“When you look at the U.S. Economy, and the gross domestic product of the country, about $4.6 trillion of economic activity happens on America’s waterways,” Schultz said. “It’s a tremendous amount of economic contribution to the nation.”
Schultz said a lot of the business and economy generated from the waterways stems from the merchant mariners whose credentials are printed and processed by the NMC.
“(The NMC) enables that 4.6 trillion of economic activity,” Schultz said. “It’s important work being done here. It seems like paper, it seems like credentials, but we want mariners who are credentialed and medically fit to do the duties they do and this place makes sure all of that happens.”