Athens County
                 Cooperative Land Administration
                  and Information Mapping system

April 30, 2002

Athens County Commissioners
15 South Court Street, 2nd Floor
Athens, Ohio 45701

                            RE: Monthly GIS Progress Report
Commissioners:

A progress report from Sanborn Colorado on our orthophoto/elevation
contours project is attached.

Jill, Ken, Tammy, and I visited the Greene County Auditor's Office,
and toured their GIS facility.  As usual, we were quite impressed with
Greene County's hospitality and willingness to assist our efforts in
every way.  Our GIS, and in particular our proposed method of managing
our parcel maintenance, mirrors the Greene County procedures.
A County Engineer employee performs the mapping of parcel splits and
transfers by maintaining the digital parcel fabric and County Auditor
employees perform all other tax plat operations and responsibilities.

Our next GIS Steering Committee meeting will be held May 16, 2002
at the new ILGARD Facility conference room.  The new ILGARD facility
is in the building furthest west in the line of main buildings
(Building #22).  The conference room number is 214 and is located
directly across the hall as you exit the elevator on the second floor.
Some parking is available in front of the building but technically all
parking at the Ridges requires a visitor's pass.  Visitor's passes are
available at ILGARD.

The County Commissioner's Association and several other county
commissioners came to Athens County for a special commissioner's
coordination meeting.  While here, they and all three Athens County
Commissioners attended a brief presentation of the Athens County GIS
hosted by ILGARD.  JB and Darren joined me in welcoming our visitors
and showcasing our GIS network and Internet applications.  It was
especially nice to have all our commissioners actively promoting our
GIS.  Our visitors seemed impressed with what we are doing in GIS.

ESRI has announced the release of ArcView 8.2 and is shipping the
new software for free to all clients on annual maintenance, including
Athens County.  For more information on ArcView 8.2, visit:
http://www.esri.com/arcview.

We received an inquiry into our GIS from Kim Brandt, E-911 Coordinator
in Van Wert County.  They are just beginning GIS and were referred to
us by Stu Davis, Executive Director of OGRIP.  They were especially
interested in and impressed by the fact that we implemented our E-911
portion of our GIS first and have been saving lives and property for
over two years.  Doug Bentley was very helpful in providing valuable
detailed information to Kim.  We have been helped by so many; it is
good when we are able to help someone else who is just getting
started.

We have purchased and received ESRI ArcIMS software.  ILGARD is
currently serving our ArcIMS (AthensGIS.com) website.  Our purchase of
ArcIMS software keeps the operation of our website legal now that we
are past the pilot phase, and we have the soft ware ready for when we
ultimately transfer the website to our future server at the Central
Online Repository of Enterprise data (CORE) GIS facility being built
over the coming two years as part of the County Engineer Office
Addition.  For more information on ArcIMS 4, visit: 
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring02articles/arcims4offers.html.

ILGARD has started the annotation capture and placement portion of our
project.  They will use ArcInfo to create an annotation feature class
based upon the owner name, deed references, and acreage for each
parcel.  This "text" will be sized and moved to a best-fit location
within the parcel boundary where possible.  This will allow for the
creation of aesthetically pleasing maps similar to our current paper
plat maps.  They have updated the deed references according to the
latest scanned plat maps for 11 of the 14 townships.  Parcel lines
have been completed, quality control measures are being performed,
and errors are being fixed.  The Auditor's office staff is now using
all of the County GIS data in a customized ArcView application.

Thank you for allowing me to coordinate this important aspect of
Athens County's future.

Archie Stanley, GIS Coordinator
555 East State Street - Athens, Ohio 45701
Phone (740) 593-5514 -  Fax (740) 592-4616
E-Mail: astanley@frognet.net