Meridian Awards 2010

Subdivision and Development Plans are submitted to local planning departments partly to enable staff to review the development layout and to assign street names and addresses to be used in an E911 system. In the early 1950s our county planning department began storing these plans in file cabinets. Over the years numerous indexing systems were modified attempting to reduce the effort in locating these plans. This process started with a card catalog system and progressed to a RDMS system. As more developments occurred our filing system became very difficult to manage. A misplaced file or folder could take days to locate.

Project History and Implementation

Beginning in October of 2006 our staff began the process to convert our paper based indexing system to a more up to date and effective digital format.

First, we converted our fifteen year old in house application written in Dbase IV to a Spatialware MS Sql Server database. This enabled our staff to interact with the data in both a tabular format for forms and a GIS interface. Triggers and Stored procedures were created inside SQL server to automatically create map objects when new records were inserted using a form based interface. This procedure eliminated the need for nightly routines that translated Dbase files to a spatial format.

Second, a large format scanner was purchased that scanned directly to PDF format. After six months of scanning and correcting the geography of these objects we eliminated twenty one 4 drawer file cabinets representing approximately 9000 plans. Our phone calls from the public and internal users of this data were reduced an average of 60 to 70 percent. Prior to this project we were answering approximately 1500 calls monthly for addressing information.

Data and geographical references to these files are now published on the internet utilizing two methods:

• A nightly report published to a PDF document with an associated hyperlink to the corresponding document is produced and published to our web site.
• Geographical searches are possible by utilizing a Pitney Bowes MapInfo Web Based Mapping product called Exponare.

In both cases the end users are now able to reference all of the assigned E911 addresses without the need for one phone call. External users such as the US Postal Service, FedEx, Emergency Services, Land Developers, Real Estate Attorneys and Taxing Officials have all been very pleased with this solution.

Internally our efficiency has increased dramatically. When we do receive the occasional phone call requesting historical information contained on these plans, staff is able to locate the document with a few mouse clicks rather than having to locate the file folder in one of many file cabinets. We estimate the time savings for each call to be nearly 10 minutes.

Future plans for converting documents include scanning floor/site plans of critical buildings identified by Emergency Management. Digital documents could be used for pre site plans or for personnel in route to an emergency. By georefrencing these files it provides an easier method for responders to locate the information they might need than utilizing an indexing method in a tabular format. These documents would only be available to authorized users.