Geographic information systems technology, or GIS, is a new level of efficiency for the delivery of government services, a tool that allows planning of infrastructure, better stewardship of the environment and increased protection for the public that governments serve – all this while decreasing the cost to taxpayers through sharing of resources.

Imagine that a county wants to develop a recycling and trash transfer center. On one hand, the county must consider a set of criteria governed by law and political reality and on the other hand are budgetary constraints. If the county has GIS technology, the criteria can be used to search for potential recycling sites just by “drilling down” vertically through the electronic map layers to sort out locations – and prioritize them quickly and efficiently using existing data. This would help sidestep the necessity of appointing a study group or hiring an expensive consultant to narrow down possible sites that meet the criteria – how water runs off, wind flow patterns, road access, neighborhood considerations or any of a number of considerations. It all comes to the surface quickly and with a minimum of cost and time.

GIS is a compilation of data in layers of information that allows the user to gain a better understanding of a specific place. Combining the information layers electronically to a specific purpose — such as finding an optimal location for a recycling center, keeping track of county road maintenance needs or getting an ambulance quickly and efficiently to the scene of an accident — provides a better understanding about the importance of location, location, location.

“GIS is the Swiss Army knife of software — it can be a data analyzer, a database manager or a briefing tool that you can copy and drop into Powerpoint presentations to express your ideas,” said Stan Reid, director of the County Information Project and County Information Resources Agency at the Texas Association of Counties. “Probably the most powerful thing about GIS is that it’s a fusion tool. It is probably the only application I know of that can fuse together all the disparate types of info – taking data, areas, imagery, maps – all kinds of things that normally don’t fuse together. You can instantly fuse all those into one view.” The power of GIS comes because it is visual – a picture is worth at least a thousand words and the many pixels of a GIS map can be worth many more because of the time saved on involved verbal or written explanations of complex subjects that become readily apparent when viewed as a map presentation.

“GIS opens up their mind and starts people to thinking about all sorts of things,” he said. “It does everything.”

Reid said GIS has applications in almost everything governments do. “Counties maintain roads and they need maps,” said Reid. “You can take your aerial photography and put it down. You have limited information you can put on a paper map, whereas (with GIS) you can easily store all the information in an attribute or layer. When you hook it up to a software program such as Access, you can query things easily – ‘Show me every road that has been paved in the past 10 years and boom, it’s there.’ With GIS you can just change it when the road changes and it’s done – it‘s all dynamic,” he said. “The classic case is the highway engineer looking at the soil layer below the road on GIS and he could see instantly why he had to re-pave that road so often.”

There are also obvious GIS implications for emergency communications. “9-1-1 spends lots of time and tax dollars to update their addresses. You can see a county doing a paper map and 9-1-1 doing a paper map and wasting tax dollars and then, which one is the correct one?” Reid asked. Tax money is conserved with GIS since all entities can cooperate on one dynamic map which is easily updated.

The technology is even a crime-fighting tool.

“A lot of cities are using GIS for crime analysis to tie the common elements together to figure what’s going on in a certain crime pattern,” he said. “They used it for the snipers in Virginia.”

One important use by counties is seen in the County Level Easily Accessible Resource (CLEAR) program in Washington and Gillespie Counties. The CLEAR has been used by citizens in those two counties to look into their natural resource base and the ecosystem surrounding it. They are able to power land use planning and management with the readily available layers that include such information as natural resources, land ownership and political boundaries, among other layers.

Because initial startup costs may be intimidating to smaller local governments with limited budgets, many entities are joining efforts through their local councils of governments.

“With the declining costs of the hardware and the increase in usability of software, everybody and his brother can have access to some type of GIS,” said Max Samfield, Data Services Manager for the Houston Galveston Area Council. “The access to all that information has really driven the technology.”

But before 1995, Samfield said, there was a scattered approach to GIS, with each agency trying to build a data net. Then, they agreed to establish a geographic data committee for the region.

“Originally, we got five organizations together to talk about how we could stay on track and we decided that we needed a vehicle for transporting that data,” he said.

That vehicle was a base map with streets and addresses. With that one common denominator, data could be shared as each organization put in a data layer. Thus was born STAR*Map, a multi-county map that is maintained through the coordinated efforts of the committee, which has grown from five entities to almost 40, both public and private.

“We distribute that map on a quarterly basis to our members, each paying $89,000 per year, which compares to the hundred of thousands of dollars each year for disparate maps that may have all sorts of errors and problems,” Samfield said. It’s the official base map for many organizations participating in Harris and Fort Bend counties.

“We put in two million parcels in those two counties; it’s a supreme effort to keep it up to date,” Samfield said. “We are now adding a 65,000 square mile color imagery project at a cost of $300,000. The lowest contribution was $2,000 and highest was $40,000. But once it’s in there, everybody gets what they want.”

“It’s been just amazing. Nobody gives you awards for saving money, but if you bring in the money in, they notice. But the people involved are aware we’ve saved literally millions of dollars,” Samfield said. “Instead of pursuing an elusive base map individually, we worked together to get a good base map, but we couldn’t do it ourselves, it was just to big. It’s really worked to everybody’s benefit,”

The next step, Samfield said, is a project with the national company that makes H-GAC’s software. H-GAC has contracted with the firm to create an editor for maintenance of the base map, to be given to all members of the committee that work on STAR*Map. Through a wide area network (WAN), the edits made by each member will be saved to a central depository – then an oversight technician will check each for accuracy and save them to the map. The updated map will be put on the WAN and the updates will appear in almost real time, mirrored across the WAN and available on a Web site. With the proposed editing system, there would be the ability to produce a daily update of the Star*Map from public works agencies for that particular layer of the map.

“For example, the City of Houston Public Works Department has their infrastructure and it matches up to our maps,” Samfield said. “The problem is that they do hundreds of changes a day and if they aren’t put up immediately, there’s may be a liability issue. But with our usual update of every three months, the base map would be outdated immediately.”

For H-GAC, the near term vision is having the WAN, with the ability to share and transport data among a number of public agencies, and that WAN would provide continual access to each other’s data – mirrored at other sites – thus protecting all the data if one member suffered a disaster such as a flood.

“It was a supreme cooperative effort. To do those kind of things you have to be able to invest some of your resources in what looks like someone else’s project,” Samfield said. “ We’ve got to go out there and sell, sell, sell, and convince them that its in their best interest to cooperate. We’ve done this in our 13 county region. But to do it on a statewide scope, it becomes difficult, just from the number of agencies you have to deal with.”

One of the problems encountered by small counties are budget constraints — just not enough money – so H-GAC has approached that through 9-1-1 map maintenance. The state hasn’t provided enough money for 9-1-1 for small counties to develop a base map. “We have a person here that does 9-1-1 map maintenance for seven counties,” he said. “We help train the local people here and they go back home to build their county map. And we’ve had great success with that. But you need to have that someone with the local knowledge to do the local addressing. Without sharing and combining resources, we would not have the success we’d had.”

Richard Kelly, Director of Regional Services for the Capitol Area Planning Council (CAPCO), said that Austin-based council of governments drew together separate programs — mapping, 9-1-1, community planning, criminal justice, economic development and the like into a combined center for GIS operations. “They were separate programs and we realized that we weren’t getting enough bang for the buck. Instead of 9-1-1 buying a plotter, and having no way to scan data in and another area having a scanner but no way to print maps, we combined it all within the agency,” Kelly said. Kelly’s section consists of himself and two staff members, about one-half supported by 9-1-1 work from nine counties in CAPCO.

CAPCO does a variety of things with GIS – working with air quality folks to place an air monitor station, mapping of 230 landfills in the area, analysis of road planning, and other planning tools. “We have a phenomenal data set because we’ve been doing it for years,” he said. “We share as much as we can. We work with local, state and federal organizations. Anybody who calls up and asks for data gets it, the public included.”

In 1997, CAPCO flew over 86,000 square miles to obtain black and white aerial photography converted to digital imagery with a resolution of two feet per pixel. “I was getting requests every day for data – like ‘I want a picture of my deer lease’,” Kelly said.

CAPCO’s Web site now provides all the black line imagery and many data sets, like roads, water, infrastructure and so on. “And now that we’ve got all that up there, we just flew (another) 86,000 miles and we’re going to put it up this spring in full color,” he said.

For the future, Kelly said that CAPCO’s goal is to become more of a portal for government agencies that need to get information online. “What we want to do is to be able to link you to all these other Web sites. You can go to our site and navigate between all these city, county and state agencies. We all realize that there’s an economy of scale this way. And we want to have data and applications useful to all users online,” Kelly said. “If you’re in a little tiny community and people are buying land to put retail stores up, then that will generate more residential units. By using these tools we can figure how the growth will go and that’s critical to future planning.”

North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) has a GIS coordinating council with 231 member governments — 163 cities, 16 counties, 26 school districts and 26 special districts, according to John Hunt, manager of GIS for NCTCOG. Hunt said the coordinating council puts all the data from all those sources together. “In urban areas the data is the most accurate, while in the rural areas we have to clean up the data more,” Hunt said. “We’re more of a data coordinating agency, but we do generate a lot of data, especially in transportation.

One way NCTCOG cuts costs is to work with local governments and universities to give students part-time work in GIS while studying the subject in school. “Students are graduating college and going to work in GIS – so it’s like priming the pump. It helps the students get a project for school and then get a job after graduation because they have actual real world experience,” Hunt said.

“We are moving toward centralized region-wide data storage. The various agencies would still own their data, but it would be in one or several centralized or linked servers,” he said.

“We’re hoping some of the Internet applications will help the rural counties. By developing some Internet tools, it will give them some GIS tools to get going with,” Hunt said. “Texas is a good place to be doing GIS because there’s a lot of coordination and cooperation going on. It is the best way to do GIS.”