Athens County
                    Cooperative Land Administration
                    and Information Mapping system

April 30, 2001

Athens County Commissioners
15 South Court Street, 2nd Floor
Athens, Ohio 45701
                                RE: Monthly GIS Progress Report

Commissioners:

I have received a ruling from our County Prosecutor, regarding a
consultant selection procedure for developing new orthophotography
and topological mapping in 2001.  We shall utilize a hybrid form of
the State Qualification Based Consultant Selection procedure (Ohio
Administrative Code (OAC) sections 153.65-71), where we will include
an accountability step of requiring a technical proposal and lump sum
fee to determine the final prioritized ranking of the most qualified
consultants selected thro ugh the regular provisions of
OAC 153.65-71.  Our sub-committee will meet next month to begin
developing the process.

ILGARD's Twentieth Anniversary celebration of the contributions their
students have made to our region was held at Baker Center.  ILGARD
serves over 60 students a year from many different academic areas.
Through student employment, young adults have the opportunity to work
on projects offering applied research and technical assistance to our
communities, our region and our state.  Posters and presentations
about the projects and services that they have been involved in were
on display.  Several GIS projects, including some for Athens County
GIS were included.  The event was well attended and very
professionally presented.

J.B. Hoy has scheduled an ArcView training class to be held at ILGARD
on May 17th and 18th.  Professor Lin Liu, an authorized ESRI
Instructor from Cincinnati will teach the class.  J.B. is handling the
registration.  Participants will be selected on a first come-first
served basis.  Additional classes will be offered as needed.

I discussed our GIS parcel conversion project and ILGARD partnership
at the ILGARD Advisory Committee meeting.  Our cooperative
relationship is a mutually beneficial experience and I was happy to
describe the benefits from our perspective.

Ken Highland will begin to gear up for next year's implementation of
our electronic property plat map maintenance application by taking an
"Introduction to ArcInfo using ArcTools" course from the
ESRI "Virtual Campus" this year.

J.B. and Darren placed our scanned property tax plat maps on the
Internet.  Go to 
http://132.235.241.200

Click on any section.  You can print the scans on your printer.
You can zoom, but print will still get you the whole section (work in
progress).  Please let me know what you think. Eventually we will have
this site as a link from our regular GIS site.
Remember that these scans are somewhat old.

I attended the ESRI ArcGIS 8.1 rollout show in Columbus.  Anyone with
current licenses will receive a free upgrade from ArcView 3.2 to
ArcView 8.1.  (All County ESRI licenses are current).  However, the
new ArcView 8.1 will require Windows 2000 Professional as a platform,
rather than Windows 95/98/ME, at least until ArcView 8.2 is shipped
over one year from now.  ESRI will also maintain ArcView 3.2 and
release ArcView 3.3 some time in the future, free with current
licensing.  So, all ArcView use rs with current licenses will have a
choice of either ArcView 3.3 or ArcView 8.1 depending upon personal
choice and windows platform.  A lot of new functionality is included
in ArcView 8.1, and the ArcGIS suite of software (as reported earlier)
includes a new intermediate "ArcEditor" software package between the
functionality of ArcView and ArcInfo.  All three of these scaleable
ArcGIS software packages share ArcMap, ArcCatalog, and ArcTools
applications.

Attached is an article written by Shoreh Elhami, GIS Director from the
Delaware County Auditor's Office.  The article briefly describes
Delaware County's GIS history, and emphasizes the Auditor’s tax
mapping and appraisal process.  Shoreh has been a great friend for
several years to Athens County GIS.

Also attached is a chapter from the book GIS in Public Policy by
R.W. Greene entitled Social Services.  Those whose job it is to help
people are finding in GIS a powerful tool for mapping and analyzing
social problems.

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