On April 5, 2016, the BOAT Program Advisory Board held its annual meeting at NASBLA headquarters, and members spent a day and a half producing some very impressive solutions and charging themselves with an ambitious list of work to resolve prior to the NASBLA Annual Conference in Seattle this September.
Recent accomplishments include:
• Evaluation of currency requirements for all 14 courses. Those requirements that will apply to certain courses will be published later this year.
• Utilization of the online portion of the Boat Crew Member course. To be utilized to shorten classroom time in delivery of BCM as an offered option.
• Final review of the new Solo Swift-Water Rescue course. The outline was approved for final development and beta testing later in 2016.
• Development and progress report on the online GPS Forensics course, to be offered later in this year.
• Development progress on construction of a permanent lab facility for NASBLA’s Advanced Boat Accident Investigation at the Pat Thomas Florida Law Enforcement Academy.
• Highlights and update on the FLIR software development and partnership with NASBLA.
• Pricing: NASBLA has held the line on course pricing for the last five years and the margins are shrinking in our ability to deliver training on a cost recovery business model. Effective July 1, 2016, full cost training programs currently priced at $28,000 will increase to $32,000. For those agencies currently committed through a purchase order or signed "scope of work" document, they will not see any cost increases on established commitments. Please contact NASBLA for pricing on specific courses, based on class size and duration. A full pricing outline will be published prior to July 1, 2016.
Immediately following the Board meeting NASBLA staff demonstrated the new database capabilities to the U.S. Coast Guard. The successful demonstration is ready for deployment in early May and will allow Coast Guard Sector Commanders and Emergency Management agencies to acquire a user name and password to query our student database when location of trained personnel to the national standard is critical in emergency response situations.
There are currently two vacancies on the BOAT Advisory Board. If you are interested in being part of our future, please contact either This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
