Athens County
Cooperative Land Administration
and Information Mapping system
January 20, 2005
Athens County Commissioners
15 South Court Street
Athens, Ohio 45701
Commissioners:
The GIS Steering Committee met:
I reported that we will fly new orthophotos this Spring for the new
US 33 Corridor, the East State Street Widening Project, and two Ohio
University tracts. JB will get location definition for the two OU
tracts. Our Land Use / Land Cover layers developed by ODNR will be
delivered this year.
Jill Thompson is excited to receive the Land Use/Land Cover data
layers and to develop a new CAUV
application. The Auditor's Office is progressing on the OS 4.0
upgrade and hopes to get data needed by ILGARD to them, and to
complete the development of the CAMA data automated Property Data
Card project by March 31, 2005. Jill announced that her Office will
be emphasizing enforcement of the
County Property Conveyance Standards and may wish to revisit the
standards and consider changing them. She will establish a committee
to do research on the need to change the standards. Jill wishes to
develop a process for Athens County property tracts to be checked by
GIS for acreage discrepancies.
Chuck Hart would like to see Ohio University develop a Central GIS
Office to eliminate redundant GIS Project Level applications by
several OU departments.
Ken delivered additional splits data to ILGARD.
JB is looking for a printing company that has the capability of
printing a 36" x 36" map sheet. This is needed in order to make the
County Highway Map a little larger to accommodate additional
information.
Darren is working with Chuck Hart on a demonstration of GIS in mapping
inventoried facility safety items such as fire extinguishers; smoke
alarms located in the OU Innovations Center. He will make a general
GIS presentation to Mr. Hart's staff. Darren will recommend that the
E-911 Center upgrade their Emergi-tech software.
Ric reported that the City of Athens is implementing GIS in their
Street Department. The City will consider packaging their ESRI
software maintenance into the County's ESRI software maintenance
program.
Donald Poole and Tracy White from the Tuppers-Plains Water District
attended the meeting and wish to continue attending to keep up with
our GIS developments. He reported that he has been reading our GIS
Progress Reports since 1997, and that it is so nice to be able to
download our GIS data rather than having to go to the Courthouse to
get it.
Jack introduced Jeremy Phillips as a new person hired into the Health
Department. Jeremy will be working on emergency preparedness. Jack
indicates that our GIS website data is utilized on an hourly basis by
the Health department staff. He hopes the Health Department will
become an exclusive ESRI Shop and move away from being a part time
MapInfo software user.
Our next GIS Steering Committee meeting will be held March 17, 2004 at
10:00 A.M. in the ILGARD conference room. Our next GIS User's
Committee meeting will be February 17, 2004 at 10:00 A.M. in the
ILGARD conference room. Mike Braasch from Ohio University Avionics
will make a presentation to the User's Committee.
The following two pages contain a list of our GIS achievements
during 2004.
Sincerely,
Archie Stanley - GIS Coordinator
555 East State Street - Athens, Ohio 45701
Phone (740) 593-5514 - Fax (740) 592-4616
E-mail:
astanley@AthensCountyGovernment.com
______________________________________________
GIS work accomplished in 2004:
The Parcel Splits Maintenance System was continued and
splits updated to 95%.
We welcomed new GIS funding Steering Committee participants LeAx Water
District, City of Athens, Athens Township, Athens County Planner's
Office, and the Athens County Health Department.
We initiated an ESRI software maintenance partnership with the
City of Athens in order to save money on all City and County ESRI
software maintenance.
We adopted a mutual assistance agreement format developed by
Chuck Hammer, Director of the Athens County Health Department
for use as the basis for a GIS Mutual Assistance Agreement.
We developed a method for converting ESRI Shapefiles into DWG format
for local engineers and surveyors use. These files will be available
as downloads on our GIS Website.
A new 2004 GIS budget, GIS Coordinator Job Description,
GIS Coordinator Contract, and Five-year plan were submitted to
and approved by the commissioners.
ILGARD and the County Auditor's Office continued work developing a
CAMA Database Tax Card Viewing GIS application.
The County Planning Office continued working on the Natural Hazard
Mitigation Plan, evacuation routing maps with EMA, and a new flood
plain layer based upon our new 5' elevation contour data. The County
Planner plans to use our GIS in updating annexation maps for the new
census update.
We initiated a GIS Technical Advisory User's Group. The Group meets
at 10:00 a.m. in the ILGARD conference room on the third Thursday of
even numbered months. The GIS Steering Committee meets at the same
time and place on odd numbered months.
We received our new Soils Data from ODNR. This new layer was paid for
through a partnership among the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
the local office of the Soil and Water Conservation, and the
County Engineer's Office.
ILGARD initiated a project for ODNR Statewide mapping the underlying
bedrock layers.
ILGARD continued development of the automated Portable Document File
(PDF) based Section Map application for the County Auditor.
Planning continued to bring a GPS based real-time emergency vehicle
location capability to enhance our already excellent E-911 operation.
ODNR continued work on a new land use map and data list. This map
will help our local planning and CAUV process, and will be used by
several other agencies in addition to the offices of Soil & Water
Conservation, Planner, and Auditor.
We arranged to have additional orthophoto and elevation contours data
sets developed for the new Athens to Darwin U.S. 33 corridor, East
State Street in the City of Athens, and two Ohio University tracts.
The County Engineer's Office continued a project with the
Ohio University Cartography Center to scan and catalog old
Road Survey maps. This will create a valuable archive from the
rapidly deteriorating paper maps. A second project will scan our
old property survey maps.
The Engineer's Office continued a project to locate our countywide
system of Section Corner Monuments by Global Positioning methods.
We initiated the process of migration of our GIS to a geo-database and
eventually to an SDE (Spatial Data Engine) Enterprise enabled system.
We initiated development of an Athens County Highway Map from our
GIS data layers. This will enable us to create an updated Highway Map
each year by simply incorporating changes into the master map file
created initially.
We arranged with ESRI to convert all our ArcView license seats to
ArcView 9. We upgraded our GIS to ArcGIS 9.0.
We purchased a new County Server for our GIS ArcIMS Website. We also
purchased Microsoft SQL Database software to be installed on the
County ArcIMS Server and will be used as part of the migration of our
GIS to a Geo-database System and eventually to a Spatial Data Engine
(SDE) System.