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There is a wealth of information on municipal Web sites for residents looking to have a closer relationship with their own village, town or city government.

Do you live in Mayfield and want to fill out a building permit application? Head to the town's site. Want to find a place to stay or eat near Minden, but don't know where to look? It's right at www.townofminden.org. The Hamilton County Web site has a searchable engine where people can peruse inns or bed and breakfasts in the county where they might like to stay.

But even though there's plenty of information on such sites, the municipal officials who run Web sites say there is so much more they can do to improve services offered to site visitors.

"We've really just scratched the surface of what we can do," town of Mayfield Code Enforcement Officer Michael Stewart said. Stewart voluntarily runs the town's Web site.

Many say they would like their Web sites to be more interactive. Almost all municipal Web sites contain basic information about the area and have contact numbers for local officials.

But there are not always ways for residents to pay for certain town services online, though many towns and cities have uploaded forms online that residents can print, fill out and return by mail instead of having to go to the town, village or city hall to get those forms. Webmasters also say there are not as many Web sites with the option to electronically submit forms as there could be.

Thanks to a push from President Obama, there recently has been considerable movement to increase Internet access in all areas of the country-about $7.2 billion from the federal stimulus package is earmarked for increasing Internet access in rural or underserved areas-and Digital Towpath Project Manager Jeanne Brown, whose organization provides a template for more than 150 municipalities and organizations across the state to run their Web sites, says Obama's push to stretch the Internet to places it may never have gone before is commendable.

"We're glad to see that we're getting confirmation that the idea we had a decade ago is a good idea," Brown said. "He's talking the same language that we've been talking forever-that we need more online."

Brown said Digital Towpath, which helps run the Web sites for the town of Mayfield, the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages and the town of Johnstown, recently installed software that runs from an assessor's computer and extracts assessment roll data. That "wizard," as Brown called it, can be integrated into sites.

She said she hopes to soon install another wizard that would help municipalities meet state Department of Environmental Conservation requirements for reporting stormwater runoff, and she said Digital Towpath is doing a study on potentially better ways towns can archive their e-mail. Commercially available solutions to that problem, she said, are "horrendously expensive."

Brown said she hopes there could be stimulus money coming to Digital Towpath for some of its projects, though she acknowledged there is a lot of competition for those funds.

Brown said a dearth of Internet access is often the biggest roadblock to citizens accessing information on town sites. She also acknowledged there are many municipalities that do not have a Web site to begin with.

Towns are often "hampered by a lack of universal broadband," Brown said.

Fulton County Administrative Officer Jon R. Stead said the county has had some setbacks in recent years in terms of modernizing its Web site. Some employees of the county's Information Service Department who had the expertise to do some site development left their jobs right before the modernizing process was to begin, which left county officials scrambling to find a way to better modernize the site.

Stead said he hoped the county eventually would put more interactive features on its site, which has a dot.gov domain name reserved for government. He said he hopes it eventually will be able to place maps on its site of which people now have to request copies, and said he hopes the county can establish a vendor system that will allow members of the public to see items that soon will go out for bid.

"It's important to make the government Web site an access point and a communication point for residents," Stead said. "It's not necessarily a marketing tool-it's a community tool."

That, in the end, is the primary way in which Web site officials say the sites can help their residents. Carol Hart, who runs the site for the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages, said the AATV has been promoting Web site use, especially in more rural communities where residents might have to drive long distances to get to their town halls.

"It's a way to have government happen without being there," she said.

Zach Subar covers rural Fulton County news. He can be reached at ruralnews@leaderherald.com