Zero to GIS in 36 Months
Authors
William T. Harbour, Jr.
Richard R. Hudson, PE
Monica Dennis
Abstract
Baldwin County, Alabama, like so many other coastal-resort counties, is experiencing tremendous growth. Between 1990 and 1996, Baldwin County population increased 25%, with the civilian labor force growing 26%. This growth has brought new challenges to the men and women responsible for governing what had been a mostly rural county. Against this backdrop, the county investigated and implemented a $4 million GIS project. This paper describes the trials, tribulations and successes of implementing and integrating GIS into the mainstream activity and thought of Baldwin County.
Introduction
Baldwin County has always been Alabama�s oldest and largest county. For the past 20 years, it�s also ranked at or near the top for population growth. And that�s no surprise. Including all of Alabama�s Gulf Coast from Mobile Bay to Florida, Baldwin boasts an average temperature of 67 degrees, abundant rainfall, 36 miles of sugar white Gulf beaches, 26 miles of bay waterfront, excellent hunting and fishing, 16 golf courses, and great shopping. It all adds up to a great quality of life �166 compared to the national average of 100. This good life is clearly reflected in population statistics. The 1990 population was estimated to be 98,780. The 1998 estimate is 130,280 and the year 2010 estimate is 169,930. That's a growth of more than 72 percent in twenty years. Such growth strains infrastructure and presents tough decisions to the men and women responsible for government.
In 1996, Baldwin County had no GIS system in place and its most recent aerial photography was more than 20 years old. It's against this backdrop that the decision to implement a GIS was made.
Every project needs a champion. A GIS project is no exception. The Revenue Commissioner and Communications and Information Systems (CIS) Director at Baldwin County recognized the need for a GIS and began the process of inquiry and education necessary to bring the project to fruition. It's very important to note that without the political and financial involvement of the revenue commissioner this project might never have gotten off the ground. It�s also important to note that the revenue commissioner supported the focus on a countywide enterprise solution, even though the bulk of the project financing would come from the Revenue Commission appraisal fund. The Baldwin County Commission also became champions and provided funding for 5-foot contours. Despite the merits of a countywide GIS, there was a long list of agencies to convert, especially the Board of Education, fire districts and municipalities, all of which receive funding from the appraisal fund. They feared that too much of their regular funding would be redirected to the GIS. Careful work by the Revenue Commissioner and CIS director showed them that their benefits GIS would outweigh any funding loss.
Concurrent with the selection of Woolpert to do base mapping and overall project management was a series of meetings with fire districts, municipalities and the Baldwin County Board of Education to calm fears and educate officials about the project�s long term goals. These early meetings also served to teach municipalities how to flag utility structures for the upcoming aerial photography. Shortly thereafter, Southern Digital Services, Inc., (SDS), was chosen to produce digital parcel maps and several Revenue Commission applications. With the hiring of a GIS coordinator the GIS project management team was set consisting of the revenue commissioner, the CIS director, the revenue commission mapping supervisor, the GIS coordinator, Woolpert and SDS. The GIS Steering Committee, formed early in the project and including the revenue commissioner, the county administrator, the CIS director, the GIS coordinator and the Woolpert project manager, continues to meet regularly to assess progress, set policy and formulate strategy. The GIS coordinator, although an employee of the CIS Department, has a dotted line of responsibility to the revenue commissioner.
Baldwin County chose to follow an enterprise distributed data model for its GIS. In this model CIS/GIS maintains the base data; provides day-to-day GIS management; carries out policy; coordinates data deliveries to users; orders, configures, installs, and maintains equipment; writes applications, and prepares custom mapping as needed. Each department is responsible for handling its own GIS and maintaining the custom data sets created from the base data. Baldwin County also committed to helping the Board of Education, fire districts and municipalities get into the GIS business, consulting with them about software and equipment purchases and providing ArcView training so they can use data quickly.
A Baldwin County Users Forum was established with membership open to all county departments, as well as the Baldwin County Board of Education, fire districts, municipalities and utilities who will be using the GIS data. This group ultimately will help the GIS Steering Committee formulate policy and decide on updates. It also provides a vehicle for updated data to flow into the main database and allows participation for funding future fly-overs. In addition, the Users Forum will eventually provide a pool of ArcInfo and ArcView trained operators to help other fledgling organizations in the county.
Baldwin County bases agreements for use of data on a Memorandum of Understanding. The Baldwin County Board of Education, fire districts and municipalities get the data for free, but other public or private agencies are expected to purchase the data or provide the county with something of equal value, whether it be new value added data or a service of some kind. The Memorandum also sets forth the terms and conditions whereby the for-profit agency can get the data. It also contains a disclaimer.
Now that the political and financial environment was "ripe," the project could proceed into the needs assessment stage. The County was broken up into 13 delivery areas. The first delivery would be a Pilot Project area including representative problems for the mapping contractors, such as grant sections � a unique challenge to SDS because of their irregular shapes. Baldwin County agreed to take delivery of ArcInfo planimetric and cadastral files laid out in a librarian tile scheme based on 10,000' X10,000' tiles.
Needs Assessment/Implementation Plan
Know where you�re going before you start the project. The needs assessment helps make sure that you do identify your county�s chief goals � not just those of the GIS group but also those of every department in your county government. If you clearly identify goals at the outset, you can keep your project on track from start to finish. Focusing on computer hardware and software can be very distracting. While technological decisions are crucial to smooth operation of the finished project, technology is only the means to a goal, and it changes almost daily. Your end goals should be virtually constant. Continual review of the original goals helps keep you on course throughout the project.
The goal of the needs assessment itself was to identify:
The first step was to interview officials of nine Baldwin County agencies who were likely to make the most use of the BCGIS. We did not expect these officials to be the only GIS users, but rather a representative group from which to develop an outline of potential GIS applications. During the interview, we asked members of each agency to suggest the kinds of GIS applications they would anticipate using. Next, the Woolpert staff developed an estimate of what data would be needed to support each of those applications. We interviewed the following officials:
Woolpert asked each official about his or her agency�s responsibilities, the mapping or tabular data presently used to accomplish those responsibilities, and whether any of the mapping or tabular data exists in digital form. In addition, they asked each official for ideas about potential GIS applications.
Agency officials identified many potential applications, including:
Revenue Commission
Public Works
Environmental Management
Probate
Emergency Management
Building Department
Economic Development
Emergency Communications District E911
Baldwin Rural Area Transportation System
Base Mapping
Every successful GIS is based on a comprehensive, consistent and well-conceived base map. In developing the base map for Baldwin County, we identified two major goals:
We encountered only one significant problem, but one that is likely to occur in any similar countywide project:
Baldwin County established the following goals for the base mapping:
Key factors in developing this consistent, countywide base mapping included:
1"=2,000'
1"=1,000'
1"=500'
1"=420'
1"=250'
1"=400' Undeveloped and forested areas
1"=200' Rural areas
1"=100' Urban areas
1"=50' Very densest urban areas (total of about one square mile)
Edge of street pavement
Street centerlines
Railroads
Hydrographic features - Shorelines, rivers, creeks, streams
Buildings (symbol)
Airfields - Edge of runways, taxiways, and aprons
Flagged utility structures - fire hydrants only structures flagged
Major power transmission lines visible from aerial photography
Major gas transmission lines visible from aerial photography
DTM data
Five-foot contours generated from DTM data
Alabama State Plane, West Zone, NAD 83
NAVD 88
453 horizontal/vertical ground control points set
Baldwin County needed differing data resolutions to optimize data display times by tailoring pixel resolution to the overall size of the area being viewed. Second, the County needed reduced resolution data sets to facilitate data transfer to the satellite courthouses.
1"=400' 2.0-foot pixel resolution
1"=200' 1.0-foot pixel resolution
1"=100' 0.5-foot pixel resolution
1"=50' 0.25-foot pixel resolution
The digital orthophoto data was also re-sampled to 4-foot, 8-foot, 16-foot, and
32-foot resolutions. Providing this variety of resolutions allows for quicker display at all County facilities and speeds transfer of data to satellite courthouses. This in turn helps meet one of the overall objectives of the GIS project � to improve data access for individual county residents.
There was no readily available, countywide address range data. We investigated a number of potential solutions:
E911 also has individual property maps with address labels on individual structures, but no ranges are shown from intersection to intersection. E911 has no information in areas that do not follow the E911 countywide addressing system.
To solve the problem, we took a multi-tiered approach:
Parcel Mapping
Long before settlers traipsed over the southern Appalachians, bringing the straight lines and square corners of the federal land section system, the Spanish had granted land to their friends all along the Gulf Coast. Some 25 per cent of Baldwin County land is divided along those meandering lines that follow land features instead of a superimposed system. Add to that the fact that Baldwin County has more than 50 miles of tidal impacted shoreline, as well as lakes, rivers and marshland, eroding bluffs and living dunes. The impact on parcel mapping is enormous.
Following the recommendations of the State of Alabama and its new specifications manual, Baldwin County chose to use coordinate geometry (COGO) to enter parcel data. The state specifications are flexible enough to match the county�s preferred database design as well as unusual land characteristics.
Parcel mapping follows a set series of tasks:
To meet Baldwin County�s special needs, SDS created a suite of mapping applications, all based on Esri ArcInfo, and a viewing application for public access. The pARCel mAPPer application has been delivered and the others are slated for delivery in the future.
Parcel Mapping Issues
Application Development
The needs analysis identified several potential applications and uses for base planimetric and cadastral data.
Although pARCel mAPPer, an off-the-shelf application, was under development at the time of the needs assessment, SDS committed to making any change needed to make a "best fit" for Baldwin County's equipment and CAMA environment.
The growth of the Internet/Intranet has enabled applications that were not available at the time of the needs analysis. Specifically the release of ArcView's Internet Map Server and Map Objects technologies has had a very large impact. The emphasis of application development has shifted from writing limited AMLs to writing any combination of Visual Basic, HTML and Avenue/ArcView applications. The implementation of Map Objects and Internet Map Server means that the county can write specific applications without putting ArcInfo or ArcView on a user�s machine.
Applications can be updated on a server and executed in a browser window, a method that is familiar to most users. The "browser" model will also allow quicker application development cycles. In some cases, ArcView may not be installed at all in a department and instead a specific browser-accessible application will be written.
The Map Objects and IMS technologies have opened up a whole world of public access applications. For example, Baldwin County is developing an application that uses ArcView Internet Map Server to send land records and parcel maps via the Internet. First, the person requesting information types in a last name, then selects the correct individual from a list sent back by IMS. Then the application queries the AS400 for tabular data, and a query is made to the View that contains the parcel map. The tabular data and parcel map are then sent back to the browser. The user can also search for surrounding property surrounding by last name or parcel number. The browser/IMS environment played to the GIS coordinator strengths because he already was familiar with HTML and Avenue. This one application is designed to meet a need identified by the revenue commissioner � to provide the public with justification for appraised value of individual parcels.
Also planned are Internet applications that will sell access to title searches and other remote searches. Any data intended for public distribution can be accessed in this manner whether tabular or map based.
Equipment and Software Needs
The county computing environment, at the time of the needs analysis, was primarily a mix of Windows 3.1, OS/2 and AS400. Computers were linked together with a Token Ring LAN topology. At the time of the completion of the Needs Assessment ArcInfo was only available for Unix platforms. The steering committee expected the GIS data to reside on an RS6000 Unix server and that all ArcInfo workstations would also be RS6000s. Users who did not need the full-blown ArcInfo would be given ArcView on PC.
Early system configurations had public works, environmental management (later absorbed into planning), the revenue commissioners office (mapping) and CIS/GIS receiving workstations and GIS software. In the two years since the needs analysis was completed, the networking, computer and GIS software environment has changed significantly. The County has shifted from Token Ring to Ethernet networking topologies, enabling data transfer rates up to 100 megabits per second rather than Token Ring's 16 mbs. This speed increase was important for transferring digital orthophotographs, which are 25 MB apiece. Windows NT was also made the operating system of choice for PCs and servers. Coinciding with the choice of Windows NT operating system was the decision to purchase ArcInfo for NT rather than the Unix version. The choice to go with Windows NT and ArcInfo for NT initially saved the county approximately 50% of the purchase price of a similar Unix system. Now PC computer systems have declined to the point where savings are greater than 50%. Also no one in the county was familiar with Unix not to mention that each person doing GIS would have to have a Unix and an NT machine on each desk � Unix for GIS and NT for everything else.
Use of UNIX would also have required a major training investment. No benchmark tests were run to compare systems but the cost vs. performance was considered not to be a factor. IBM was chosen for all GIS PC purchases partly because IBM equipment was already in widespread use throughout the county and maintenance contracts were in place.
The county organizational structure has also changed in the two years since the start of the project. Some departments have grown and acquired new responsibilities and some have been absorbed by others. This, along with the ever-changing software and hardware environment, has caused constant reevaluation of the Implementation Plan by the GIS Steering Committee and has emphasized the need to be flexible.
The Implementation Plan calls for a main server at the county seat of Bay Minette and an auxiliary server at the emergency operations center in Robertsdale. The Robertsdale dataset was to be updated periodically. Users in four satellite offices were slated to use data from this server, which would service the southern half of the county. An equally important factor in housing a dataset in Robertsdale was to provide access to both EOC and E911 (located next door to the EOC) in the event of an emergency. No server has been placed in Robertsdale but this is still considered an alternative. Baldwin County has close to 1,600 square miles of land area and three telephone systems, so providing networked data to the satellite facilities is a challenge.
A second and more specific needs analysis was done for Public Works, revealing that ArcCAD was a better solution than ArcInfo for that department because the individual slated to operate the GIS for Public Works is an experienced AutoCAD user. Instead of learning a completely new software environment, the operator would only need to learn the PC ARC/INFO data model. The use of Workspace Translator would make for easy update of Public Works data to the main GIS database. The Public Works needs analysis also indicated that the installation of ArcView Spatial Analyst would aid in cross drain adequacy analysis and watershed mapping.
One of the first benefits of the developing GIS is the automation of the Revenue Commissioner�s Mapping Department. Each mapper in the Revenue Commissioner�s Office will use Southern Digital Service's pARCel mAPPer software to do parcel splits and subdivision entries. pARCel mAPPer runs on top of ArcInfo as an AML application. All mappers will have two 21" monitors and their PCs will have dual video cards. This two-monitor configuration allows the mapper to have pARCel mAPPer on one screen and the deed from which to map on the other. The mappers use Delta's CAMA software to manage land record data regarding splits and subdivisions.
Conclusions
WHERE WE ARE
At the writing of this paper (March '98) the base map for the whole county is just about complete. It's expected that by the end of May, all base map data for the county will be delivered. The County should take delivery of the first digital parcel maps in April, 1998.
LESSONS LEARNED
What�s Next?
Author Information
Bill Harbour, GIS Coordinator, Baldwin County Commission, Annex Building � 312 Courthouse Square, Bay Minette, Alabama 36507. Phone 334.580.2535; Fax 334.580.2538; e-mail bharbour@co.baldwin.al.us
Rick Hudson, Senior Project Manager, Woolpert LLP, 6420 Wall Street, Mobile, Alabama 36695. Phone: 334.633.2033; Fax 334.633.2443; e-mail rick.hudson@woolpert.com
Monica Dennis, Regional Manager, Southern Digital Services, Inc., 340 Mendel Parkway, Montgomery, Alabama 36695. Phone: 334.395.6303; Fax 334.395.6310; e-mail sds-montgomery@mindspring.com