GIS
When you look at its many tasks, the business of public works is as perfect a fit with the technology of GIS as any undertaking, public or private.
After all, a piece of infrastructure for which public works agencies are responsible likely rests on every square detail of the modern landscape, from roads and bridges to water and sewer lines to solid waste facilities. And before agencies can site it, build it, fix it, maintain it or replace it, first they have to find it.
A GIS can get public works departments there much more quickly and arm them with an incredible amount of information.
“Most public works departments [considering a GIS] just want to know where everything is,” says Joe Francica of Huntsville, Ala.-based Intergraph. “As opposed to pulling out a bunch of papers, they can just look at one map.”
In DeKalb County, Ga.’s public works department, for example, Roads and Drainage Director Carl Glover says he looks for the increased GIS capability the county is building to help his staff more easily locate things like drainage points, retention ponds, manhole covers and dangerous curves in roadways.
“Currently, we have a poor [idea] of where these infrastructure items are located,” he says. “With GIS, we can go and pinpoint the location within about one meter.”
As a result, work crews spend a lot less time – Glover estimates 50 percent less – searching for retention ponds or clearing acres of brush to uncover drainage outfalls. The system also helps accurately delineate boundaries for road work.
“We have to know where property lines start and end, where rights-of-way stop and end,” Glover says. “By putting it in GIS, we can immediately identify [that].”
Glover admits that he is seriously excited about the possibilities.
“It will make our jobs a lot easier,” he says. “We think so much of it, we’ve put $600,000 into the GIS program the rest of this year, just for roads and drainage.”
Actually, DeKalb County, like a lot of local governments in urban areas, has been into GIS technology for several years. The first step, starting in 1986, was to digitize tax maps and make them available to departments like public works. Ten years of experience with this basic system convinced the county of its potential, and a serious upgrade in the detail of available information began in 1995.
The county is now in the middle of a basemapping project, digitizing things like curbsides, manhole covers, power and light poles and water features. The county’s vendor is mapping highly accurate contours and a great deal of elevation data that engineers will be able to use in conceptual design for new roads or drainage projects, according to DeKalb GIS Director Denise Finley.
“The inspiring thing to me is that we have so many departments here managing geography, and they need the most updated maps they can get,” Finley says. “Our staff is just starving for map and data information on what they are managing.”
Indeed, public works is so hungry for the information it assigned a person full-time to Finley’s office to help double-check base maps. And of approximately 50 workstations with GIS access, 30 are located in public works offices.
Finley says that since the public works staffer assisting her is learning the fundamentals of the GIS process, he will be able to share this knowledge with others in his department not as familiar with the technology.
“We do have a really good partnership here with public works, and they have been real supportive of this project since day one,” she says. “The county’s CEO (Liane Levetan) has placed a lot of emphasis on building interdepartmental teams, and I think GIS is an enabler of that.”
Indeed, ‘enable’ is the key word, as an increasing number of cities and counties like DeKalb are realizing what GIS technology can allow them to do. Even for the technologically wary, it is finding a place among history’s fundamental changes in the way things are done.
As Dennis Ross, APWA’s director of professional development, puts it, “The potential for GIS is virtually unlimited, because almost everything we do has a geographical location.”
That potential includes more than providing an inventory agencies use to quickly locate a silt-covered manhole or small outfall, points out Paul Klimas, GIS project manager for Dayton, Ohio-based Woolpert. The real promise is in the links between a GIS and other systems that can help officials make major funding and manpower decisions.
In places like the southwest, Jody Paden, director of the Oklahoma Technology Transfer Center, says that local government agencies are “deciding that [GIS technology] is serious and for real, and seriously understanding its potential.”
And in the rest of the country, “the vast majority of people out there aren’t using it yet,” Paden says. “But it’s coming, and it’s happening fast.
“It’s rapidly becoming a much more dependable source of information. It’s just going to take off in leaps and bounds,” he predicts.
Francica agrees that the use of GIS is spreading, and he credits in part the declining costs of some of the required hardware. For example, the higher powered PCs that run various GIS applications have become more affordable, he says.
Local governments that have taken the leap are at different stages in the process of converting information into the digital format. Some, like large-scale joint city-county projects in Louisville/Jefferson County (Ky.) and Knoxville/ Knox County (Tenn.), have had detailed databases in place for several years. Others are like DeKalb, either creating or updating base maps as the foundation for multiple layers of information.
“The biggest issue with the public works people I work with is cost savings, doing better maintenance management,” Klimas says. “They want to know what valves they have, when they were last turned, when they were put in . . . where low pressure occurs.”
In Johnston County, N.C., the department of utilities hopes to have access to that kind of information eventually. The department is using GPS technology to inventory the water and sewer lines for which it is responsible, and the inventory will be added as a layer to the county’s existing GIS database, according to GIS Director Terry Ellis.
The utilities department already had access to the database, but the new layer will provide data more specific to its needs. Ellis says the department has gotten past early concerns about the added task of collecting data to see the system’s potential.
“I think they’re seeing more value for it as they move along,” he says.
That value is also clear to Des Moines and Polk County (Iowa), participants in a nearly completed joint mapping project. The county is converting real estate data into a GIS, while the city is converting data for storm and sanitary sewers, as well as some zoning information.
The sewer information is largely what the city’s public works department is after, according to GIS/Graphics Supevisor Mark Rasmussen. Public works crews will soon be able to take into the field sets of maps with information like pipe and manhole ID numbers. Rasmussen says the crews may go to laptops if the maps prove too small to read.
Greeley, Colo., is a bit further along. The city has had a GIS database in place for several years, though the process of updating and expanding it continues. The GIS program, part of public works’ engineering division, is now focusing on possible links of other information systems to the GIS.
Basically, any system that helps the city manage infrastructure has information that could be linked usefully, says Deputy City Engineer Steve Bagley. The city is working on linking its pavement management system now, and the traffic department’s street sign inventory is another of many possibilities.
“There is no end to the information and plans that you could integrate into it,” Bagley says. “Every day, we come up with new ideas . . . When you just start thinking about all the things that public works people do, there are not many of them that can’t take advantage of GIS.”
Underlying this capacity in GIS technology to help agencies locate structures quickly and to tie in countless types of information is the power of a visual presentation. What graphics people have long known is that some things just do not sink in until a map, chart or photo makes them clear. In the realm of public works, a color-coded map can do wonders in showing staff, elected officials and the public the scope of a project.
“What we know, from the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, is that people can absorb complex information much more easily if it is presented to them visually,” says Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies GIS technology as a component of emergency management. “So GIS becomes a vehicle that public managers or analysts and public policy people can use to represent a very complex situation in a way that policy managers can understand easily.”
In Greeley, for example, Bagley points to an upcoming bond issue as a perfect opportunity for the use of the city’s GIS in this way. The city manager and other staff have churned out maps showing the locations and features of infrastructure improvements to be voted on in November. Of course, the maps may not win the citizens’ approval, but at least their votes will be better informed ones.
Likewise, Greeley public works engineers now working on a major intersection replacement created maps of the job for distribution to nearby businesses and the newspaper.
A note of caution from the world of GIS: Building a map of basic information is one thing; linking this database with other systems to realize a GIS’s full potential will take a lot more time and resources.
“It’s not hard to get in,” Francica says. “I think the more definite problem is sustaining the investment.
“It can snowball,” he says. “It does take a sort of visionary saying, ‘We can get into this, but it may take more resources to sustain it.'”
The bottom line is that the technology may not be for everyone. Klimas says he tells some local agencies that if they have methods already in place that are working, they should probably stick with them. Deciding whether a GIS would be a cost-effective enhancement or an unmanageable drag on funds and manpower is the key.