Tuesday was the last day the Steamship Authority board of governors held their regular monthly meeting in borrowed quarters. This week’s meeting took place in the Falmouth Art Center. Starting in March, the meeting will take place in a wide-windowed conference room at the boat line’s new administration building at 228 Palmer avenue.

As the building nears completion, Steamship Authority management and accounting staff have moved into their new offices, with potted plants already lining some windowsills, art hanging on walls and computer screens glowing with data.

As of Tuesday, all that remained at the old terminal building in Woods Hole, Mr. Davis said, were the computer services for the reservation system. Those were being moved to the new headquarters on Feb. 21, requiring the system to shut down from 4 p.m. Wednesday until 6 a.m. Thursday.

Reservations will be unavailable during this period, he said.

Once the servers have been safely reinstalled at their new location, the old terminal will undergo hazardous-materials abatement and then demolition, both by Rhode Island contractor J.R. Vinagro.

Also nearly finished is the mid-life refurbishment of the ferry Martha’s Vineyard, which is “proceeding very rapidly,” director of maintenance and engineering Carl Walker told the governors Tuesday.

The vessel underwent dock trials Saturday and sea trials on both Sunday and Monday, he said, and was scheduled to leave the Senesco Marine shipyard in Rhode Island Wednesday for the Steamship Authority’s boat maintenance facility in Fairhaven.

A sea trial with the Coast Guard, which must issue a stability report before the Martha’s Vineyard can return to service, is set for Feb. 28.

The ferry is scheduled to resume the Vineyard route on March 3. It will carry the same number of vehicles and passengers as it did before the refurbishment, which began in early September.

But it’s returning with a new pilot house, retractable bow doors and a completely renovated interior, including in-cabin stair towers and a center-cabin concessions area with aisles on either side.

“It’s going to be a great boat,” Mr. Walker said.

The Steamship Authority is redesigning its RFID commuter cards, while rolling back a 2007 policy that allowed multiple people to travel together at a discount by using the same multi-ride ticket book or commuter card.

Also on the table at the meeting were the rechargeable electronic smart cards, which has allowed the boat line to see and track how the commuter discount is being used. General manager Robert B. Davis told the board of governors Tuesday that according to the data, about 75 per cent of Vineyard passengers and 58 per cent of Nantucket passengers use their cards for one ride at a time.

Another 20 per cent of card users on each route are traveling two at a time with a single pass. The rest are stacking from three to dozens of people on the same boat at the commuter rate, said Mr. Davis, providing as examples one group of 30 and another of 47 who traveled together at the discount rate by purchasing commuter cards.

This poses a problem for the boat line because the discounted cards are exempt from a 2003 state law imposing a $.50 embarkation fee on every one-way passenger ride.

“This is something no one had thought about in 2003. It’s what people in tax law call a loophole,” Steamship Authority general counsel Steven M. Sayers said. “The Massachusetts Department of Revenue will probably issue regulations requiring us to [close] it later if we don’t do it now.”

The governors voted unanimously to return to the “one book, one passenger” policy that had been in effect until 2007. The only difference is that the book of 2007 has become a plastic RFID card, with the new version expected early this spring.

Currently the cards are issued with either 10 or 46 trips, but Mr. Davis said smaller amounts could be programmed as well.

“We could make them five rides instead of 10, so husband and wife would be putting out the same money to buy five trips each,” he said.