Athens County
                 Cooperative Land Administration
                  and Information Mapping system

January 31, 2002

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

Karen Adkins, our Project Manager from Sanborn Colorado will come
to Athens next month for the initial coordination meeting on our
orthophoto/elevation contours project.  Chuck Canter will attend
part of the meeting as well.

The City of Athens has agreed to an alternative driveway/parking
lot configuration for our renovation/addition project to the City
of Athens.  The City is building the drive/lot as part of the
East State Street widening project in return for the right-of-way
take on our frontage.  The new design will better meet ADA
requirements and will be a far safer exit drive design.  We will
exit our customers to the side or rear of our lot and up the side
street to our new traffic light at East State Street, rather than
directly out on to East State Street in front of our building and
too close to the traffic light.

Fred Forbes and I will meet with a brick manufacturer next month
and examined several brick styles for our new office building.
The new brick will be medium to dark brown in color.  Horizontal
offset (shadow) courses will be used.  We are going out to bid
for the construction of the addition next month.  Bid openings
are scheduled for April and ground breaking in May.  We have to
have some asbestos abatement done as part of the project and we
will open bids for that phase in March.

ILGARD has completed all of the splits that they have to date
except for Trimble Township.  They are less than half way through
the update process for Deed References for the entire county.
This should be finished in about 2 to 3 months.  They are also
gearing up for one last quality control check of line data and
fitting the adjoining parcels between townships.  Within this
final quality control process they will look for any and all
geography discrepancies.  We plan to update the ArcIMS site and
we may elect for some additional training or ESRI assistance.

Chuck Canter will complete our ground control points observations
by February 15, 2002, and will have raw coordinate data to me a
week later.  All control point monuments have been set.

Darren and I made a presentation before the Athens County Bar
Association.  Several attorneys attended and expressed interest
in using GIS on-line.  I have received quite a lot of subsequent
feedback as a result of this presentation, including one attorney
statement that GIS was the most important innovation in local
government in the last 50 years.

Our next GIS Steering Committee meeting will be held at the new
Wayne National Forest Building on March 21, 2002 at 10:30 a.m.
The January meeting was cancelled due to scheduling problems at
the Wayne Office.

I have attached an article from the
current copy of ESRI ArcNews, regarding the 9/11/01 New York City
terrorist attack and how GIS was used extensively to assist the
Office of Emergency Management.  It is a lengthy article and so
I have included excerpts here for quick overview:

Value of GIS Demonstrated

Certainly the value of GIS was demonstrated by the events of
September 11 and afterward. Harwood says that any doubts anyone
had about the power of GIS were erased. "It was very important to
have the ability to rapidly create these maps--first simple ones,
later complex ones and GIS analysis," says Harwood. "It was
invaluable to have quick access to accurate maps from all of the
different agencies from all over the City, including live data,
and to be able to produce maps that were meaningful fo r the
rescue workers, the mayor's office, and the public."

Are data sources readily available? Are agencies prepared to
immediately store their data? Who are the people who can
instantly mobilize into a 24x7 workforce?  All these are
important questions that local government GIS users should ask
themselves.

GIS Is About Integration

There was much value in using GIS to integrate the data in New
York City. The GIS put all the layers of information together for
the first time. Departmental system data was used. People in a
disaster need to understand how all the information from
different departments is related geographically and how it
connects and describes the whole urban organism.

Tait says, "We need to recognize GIS is about integration and
shouldn't stop with the successful implementation of one or more
sets of functions. The good thing to come out of this is a
clarity in our minds about the positive role that GIS can play in
normal activities and especially how it can have an even greater
impact if it's done in an enterprise context." He advocates
creating an enterprise vision for aggregating project efforts and
departmentalized data sets into an integrated system that is
available for all of the groups within an organization.

During an emergency, there is a huge demand for making hard-copy
maps. They provide a kind of framework for organizing what was,
what is, and what will be needed. This means plotters and
printers that are both fast and durable are essential...
…The Internet and Internet service mapping leveraged access
enormously because users could do it themselves.

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
Email: astanley@frognet.net