Use a numeric feature ID instead of directly copying the string ID from the shapefile

N.B. Please leave merging the branch to me (Urmila) - without running the appropriate migration script immediately afterwards (which I am still working on), staging will be broken.
firstContains already returns an Option, so all you should need to do is this:  ` map(_.item)`  and leave out the getOrElse.  This should get you the Option[Int] already.