Mapping Out Solutions
By converting statistics into "intelligent maps," the application of geographic information systems offers innumerable benefits for business and government alike

GIS aficionados use an esoteric dialect. They speak of "COGO" and "rasters" and "zeroing in." They employ acronyms like ESRI and ESIC and utter things like "the congruence of memory power and software platforms creates a visualization of data input and spatial relationships."

Or, as one academic admits, "Geography is now cool."

What is making geography cool is the very exciting application of GIS – geographic information systems – in the very practical world of government and business decision making. It is the conversion of statistics into pictures to create "intelligent maps."

Kentucky is becoming a leader in the uses of GIS – primarily due to a pioneering, and nationally recognized, effort in Jefferson County.

Today’s GIS, which appears to be evolving exponentially, has its origins in the concurrence of extraordinarily accurate satellite photography, powerful and flexible personal computers, and imaginative software systems that can create maps from any data that has some spatial orientation.

These software systems utilize either aerial photographic imagery or points, lines and polygons to build base maps upon which data can be overlaid like mylar sheets in an anatomy textbook. Most of these systems have been developed either by the Earth Science Information Center of the U.S. Geologic Survey or by the Environmental Systems Research Center, Inc., in Redlands, California. The Jefferson County project, the University of Louisville and most of the state’s GIS applications use the ESRI software as their core system.

Creating LOJIC

The Jefferson County project, now called "LOJIC" (Louisville/Jefferson County Information Consortium), had a prosaic beginning in 1985 when the Metropolitan Sewer District began its planning for a county-wide sanitary and storm sewer system. Other agencies banded together and LOJIC now includes both the city and county governments, MSD, the Louisville Water Company, and the Property Valuation Administrator’s Office. It has its own staff and offices and has signed cooperative agreements with 13 county fire districts, several suburban cities, and the University of Louisville Gas & Electric system. LG&E, which now includes Kentucky Utilities statewide, has its own proprietary GIS system that is not entirely compatible with the LOJIC system; consequently, the utility describes its role in LOJIC as "supportive" and "cooperative" although it is not yet a participant.

Curt Bynum is the LOJIC GIS Coordinator, overseeing the applications of the technology by the participants and licensees and promoting LOJIC to the public. He hosted the first local celebration of National GIS Day in November and sells GIS products, primarily maps and map books, to the public. The results of utilizing GIS in Jefferson County are "better local records and better local decision-making," he believes.

For example, to be able to use GIS, Jefferson County first had to convert all its rural addresses to the E-911 system, which gives a precise spatial point to every one of the county’s 290,000 parcels. This conversion also created an immediate benefit for the county’s police, fire and emergency response units.

Meanwhile, the City of Louisville has used GIS to map locations of historic structures, incidents of suspected lead poisoning, crime reports and industrial brownfields. It is employing this base data to schedule police patrols, plan the proposed route for the TARC (Transit Authority of River City) light rail system and organize the ambitious housing initiative announced by Mayor David Armstrong. The city even uses GIS to plot the timing of street and alley repavings for the Board of Aldermen so those elected officials can have firm data to withstand political pressure for out-of-sequence projects.

Louisville is also using GIS to help manage its traffic in the downtown and surrounding areas. The city Traffic Control Center controls 580 signals to enhance flow by adjusting timing to allow for 18 different hourly and daily traffic patterns. The City hopes to have a real-time management system in place in the next few years.

The University of Louisville is an important participant in GIS, through its cooperation with LOJIC and also with state agencies. Its Center for GIS is the only one in the state (although Murray State University is the site of the Remote Survey Center for the U.S. Geologic Survey) and is the local licensee for ESRI software. As such, U of L employs LOJIC as the test site for the most advanced versions.

Furthermore, the University has completed a hydrologic analysis of the Salt River basin and its tributaries, a model for subsequent state studies of other areas that are being used as the bases for proposed environmental legislation, such as the "bottle bill" and state-wide garbage collection.

Under the supervision of Associate Director Robert Forbes, U of L geography students are identifying concentrations of people, per hour and day, in such facilities as hospitals, schools, factories and shopping centers for inclusion in the Jefferson County Risk Management Plan.

Forbes himself has helped two county fire departments improve their response time, with U of L’s own ArcView Software. For St. Matthews, his center edited a 450-page map book to 88 usable pages that can be updated continuously, as needed. For Harrods Creek, it created the RAMM (Remote Access Mapping Module) it hopes to patent, a real-time route and infrastructure display that is encased in a special shock-, dirt- and water-resistant frame with a touch screen that the firemen can activate while wearing bulky gloves.

Getting down to business

Business uses of GIS are so numerous that to map them would require a real-time version of the technology itself. FedEx and UPS use proprietary tracking systems to plot pickup and delivery routes. John Deere and Sears pioneered now-universal systems to plan internal warehouse "shipping" routes integrated with instant inventory reports. Virtually every franchise system uses GIS data to identify optimum sites for new locations.

The point at which government, business and public interests in GIS most overlap is in the Property Valuation Administrator’s (PVA)office. This office is found in every county and is actually a function of the state Revenue Cabinet. The PVAoffice has the primary responsibility for property boundaries, ownership and values. As such, the decisions by the PVA are the basis for all other local government services and functions.

In Jefferson County the PVA is Denise Harper-Angel, first elected in 1992. She oversees a staff of 75, the maximum permitted by state law, which assesses 60,000 parcels a year and answers inquiries from almost 20,000 visitors. Knowing that her responsibilities would grow as the county developed and aware that her staffing was fixed, she "made the decision to be more efficient," says Shannon Tivitt, the PVA’s chief of staff.

The office quickly joined LOJIC, replacing the cumbersome property books with online listings and adopting a center for public-access terminals, which are updated weekly. (Staff data is updated daily.) Realtors, developers, title runners and attorneys use the terminals daily, as do property owners verifying assessments.

"We now have easily accessible and comparable data on all properties in the county," Tivitt explains. "This has increased the public’s confidence in the accuracy and fairness of the process" and significantly reduced the number of appeals of rulings to less than five percent.

By selling a series of individual property maps available nowhere else, the Jefferson County PVA office has generated $1 million in fees since 1992, a sum that has been directly reinvested in new technology.

Soon the system, now available only in the courthouse annex downtown, will be available online at the county’s library branches.

Other counties are following Jefferson’s lead, thanks in part to semi-annual education seminars sponsored by the Revenue Cabinet. Kenton County, with 60,000 parcels, now "uses all the GIS layers throughout the county," according to Merrick Krey, the chief deputy in that county’s PVA office. Fayette and Clark counties are "rapidly developing" systems and rural Garrard County has a "state-of-the-art" system in place, reports Nick Kearney, the GIS coordinator for the Revenue Cabinet.

But, Kearney cautions that most counties are "way behind the pioneers," with local efforts stalled by concerns about cost and security. "Expense is always a problem" for an investment-based project, he agrees, and many counties are worried about "broadcasting private property data," even though all the information that would be available is already public information.

But the biggest obstacle is the reality that Kentucky has 1.5 million parcels state-wide that have not been converted into E-911 addresses and then to digital format, the essential first step for any GIS system.

One potential source for that process – the U.S. Census Bureau – has not developed. The bureau, which utilizes its own GIS system in rural areas, does not convert what it calls "non-city style" addresses into E-911 format and does not even use GIS in urban areas. Indeed, the decennial Census refused any assistance from LOJIC in Jefferson County, relying instead on its own 10-year-old non-GIS maps.

Will the rest of the state eventually adopt GIS? "Maybe by the end of the 21st Century," Kearney says with a laugh, adding, seriously, that the Revenue Cabinet is encouraging the PVAs to form consortia like LOJIC. Supporters often find "enthusiastic" support from local law enforcement and emergency services, who visualize immediate benefits.

In Jefferson County, there is also an important, if less obvious, advantage to GIS, according to Curt Bynum, the LOJIC coordinator. "By placing our data into an open public access system, we allow ordinary citizens to participate more meaningfully in the decisions that affect them."

Bob Carter is associate editor of The Lane Report.

Sidebar: Louisville's "Mr. Maps"

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