BLOOMFIELD — Gov. Chet Culver has honored Davis County’s deputy recorder Megan Clyman with recognition generally reserved for state employees: a Golden Dome award.

Clyman, a deputy recorder for Davis County for the past 10 years, was part of the team that designed the solution for the Department of Natural Resources to register/title snowmobiles and ATVs throughout Iowa.

“The DNR was so backlogged it came to the point it knew something needed to be done,” she said.

The DNR contacted all of the county recorder offices and asked for input; Clyman volunteered to participate.

“It was definitely a joint effort,” she said of the team of 16 comprised of county and state employees and stakeholders from such organizations as the Iowa Off-Highway Vehicle and Iowa State Snowmobile Associations, among others.

Because her team included state employees, Clyman became eligible for the prestigious award.

The group gathered at a week-long work session in January 2007 to discuss options.

The solution came quickly.

It was obvious “the quickest fix was to use the system for hunting and fishing licenses” as a database model, Clyman said.

Known as ELSI (Electronic Licensing System of Iowa,) the database links together and makes accessible registration information for snowmobiles and ATVs from all 99 counties.

The effects on the registration and titling process since ELSI was implemented have been dramatic. The number of steps involved was reduced from 114 to 12. The number of paperwork handoffs fell from 31 to 7. The number of delays in the process dropped from 26 to 1. And processing time, start to finish, plummeted from 311 days to only one.

Clyman said that although “the system has a few bugs to work out,” it is working well, and the migration to ELSI-II, the Web-based version, is already under way.