"MOVING TOWARD MUNICIPAL GIS"
Development of GIS for Small and Large Municipalities

Welcome from Richard Hunt, GIS Instructor, Worcester State College

Contact Information:
Richard G. Hunt, Associate Professor
Worcester State College
Department of Geography and Earth Sciences
Office: S-201

Phone: (508) 929-8000, Ext. 8606
E-mail: rhunt@worc.mass.edu

Presentation by Gary Kaplan, Executive Director, and Liem Tran, Program Coordinator, Jobs For Youth - Boston, Inc.

• Disadvantaged students are participating in an 8-month GIS training program in preparation for placement into GIS posiitons.
• Some training is done in cooperation with the University of Massachusetts-Boston Geography Department
• Attendees were urged to consider recruiting program participants from the first graduating class of this fall

Presentation by Jeff Jones, President of T-Soft, Inc.

• Have a strategy for implementation in place before starting
• Show your results
• Use your data

• Access to data from many different city offices
• Support planning and Decision making through automated analysis and mapping
• Make GIS tools for the town – not the other way around (do not try to change the way things are done to fit the system-design tools flexible enough to accommodate town needs).
• Make GIS simple enough to be accessible everyone, regardless of training.
• Enable data sharing to take advantage of economies of scale.

• Large initial financial outflow – data creation, training, staff.
• Unpredictable recurring costs ????
• Legacy problems – data not very useable due to previous data methods ?????

• Low overall cost – saving money on time and training
• Adaptability to existing data sets – data formats don’t need to be changed.
• Long term adaptability and extensability.
• Compatibility with ARC, Dbase, SYBASE, ORACLE etc.

• Start with existing data sources (ie. MassGIS data layers) to save costs
• Use early successes to justify increased expenditures for more expensive databases like assessors parcels
• Use your data – don’t make data collection an end in itself.

Presentation by Hugo Cardenas, GIS Coordinator, City of Worcester Office of Planning and Community Development

"The GIS Model for Worcester"

• Maintain, update, distribute
• Confirm integration and integrity
• Expand capabilities and analysis

• Training of non-GIS staff unsuccessful because they don’t use the software regularly.
• If GIS is too successful it can lead to bottlenecks on system
• Department is swamped with GIS requests now that so many people are aware of its capabilities
• Too much staff time is devoted to repetitive requests.

• Reduced training and workload
• Increased client office technology

• The "Worcester Model" includes customized, easy to use applications created for mapping, analysis and updating.
• One example application is one in which an assessor's spreadsheet was connected to a GIS database.
• The city contracted out to T-Soft to develop this application.
• One of the advantages of this application was the short learning curve for the city assessor.
• A similar project is being considered for the Fire Department and is being put out to bid.
• Currently new data layer development is driven by map requests

Presentation by David Streb, Planning Coordinator and GIS Manager, City of Fitchburg

"GIS Projects in Fitchburg"

• Lower Main Street Improvement project, for which the city has received millions of dollars in grant money
• Surface water protection.
• A downtown connector highway to Route 2
• Mapping tax title properties. The city was able to collect a huge amount of additional revenue by finding delinquent properties. They also used the internet to apply pressure on these landowner by publishing their names. This practice was abandoned, however because they "took a lot of heat for it".

E-mail: dstreb@ci.fitchburg.ma.us
Website: http://www.net1plus.com/users/fitchburg/dstreb/aboutgis.html 

Presentation by Wayne Feiden, Planner, City of Northampton

• The city started its GIS program 8-9 year ago.
• Atlas GIS was chosen as the software package because the training costs were lower and it allowed them to do the projects they were interested in at the time.
• They also got Maptitude from a HUD grant and MapInfo
• They are currently migrating to ArcView because it works better on a network and to take advantage of the use of hot links
• They are currently also switching their data form NAD27 to NAD83.
• One GIS example application was one for locating fire stations based on mapping fire calls citywide.
• GIS "Wish List":
• All towns and cities adopt a common set of surveying standards to minimize rubbersheeting.
• A map of high quality control points (concrete monuments) and require surveyors to tie into these points whenever they are within a given distance of them
• Surveyors should put down concrete monuments in all new subdivisions.

Phone: (413) 587-1266
Website: http://city.northampton.ma.us/

Last Updated 4/19/2000
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