An Open Reliance
Palm Beach County continues to expand applications for GIS
By Mary Jo Wagner

I survived the GIS section of Palm Beach County. "It's a fitting phrase for a t-shirt," muses Donna Goldstein, supervisor of the GIS section of the county's planning, zoning & building (PZB) department located in West Palm Beach, Florida.
    Fitting for anyone who has witnessed the whirlwind growth of the department's robust and comprehensive GIS. They're likely to be overwhelmed by its vast amount and array of data, its data search and retrieval capacity, its map-making capabilities, and its data distribution infrastructure. Indeed, experiencing Palm Beach County's GIS can be one heck of a ride.
    Just within the past year, the GIS has become a key element in producing more efficient and effective county departments such as the PZB and code enforcement. The strength of its data and its system capabilities has allowed the GIS to play a central role in some rather high-profile projects in the county as well. In short, the GIS has been busy.

A Bumpy Road
Typical of most government agencies, the road to developing the section's mature GIS was often bumpy and lonely.
    Goldstein's adventure began in 1990 when she joined the PZB department and was faced with one MicroStation and one AutoCad workstation with which to build a GIS. After acquiring a CAD basemap from the engineering department, Goldstein manually digitized one of the first datasets she obtained-the 1990 Census tract and block group data. That provided the necessary information to perform some initial spatial analyses, but the system required a substantial technological facelift to meet the objectives of both the GIS section and PZB department.
    The first improvement came over 1 year later in the form of Intergraph Corporation's Modular GIS Environment (MGE) software, says Goldstein. Based on MicroStation CADD, MGE provides a suite of tools to create, maintain, query, and analyze GIS data.
    "After installing MGE, I started to develop databases, featurize files and link the information," she says. "That's when our real GIS progression began."
    Since then the section staff has increased to six, and the amount of data has increased with augmented hardware and software that support the system.
    To date, an Intergraph ISMP630 server uses Windows NT 4.0 and an Oracle 7.3 relational database to support 5 Intergraph TD (3 TD-410 and 2 TD-425) workstations. An optical jukebox processes and stores 54 gigabytes of 4-foot resolution digital orthophotography.
    MGE serves as the backbone of the system. Three other Intergraph software packages-Imagineerª, GeoMediaª and GeoMedia Web Mapª-were recently added.
    The system now contains over 1500 "intelligent" data files, many of which have databases linked to them. In addition to the census data, users can access information such as existing and future land use, drainage districts, flood zones, municipal boundaries, traffic analysis zones (TAZ), zip codes, bikeways, population statistics, and major retail centers. The system also provides the locations and contact information for schools, libraries, fire stations, and city halls.
    And 1% of a long-awaited dataset-the parcel information-was just added in June, taking the GIS from a generalized data system to a site-specific data system. Having parcel data for the county allows personnel to perform very detailed queries. For instance, with parcel-level data, users can identify a particular house on a residential block whereas with generalized data, users were limited to finding a certain neighborhood.
    The GIS section of the PZB department was developed predominantly to support the mission of PZB. And today 70% of the section's daily tasks are still directed towards the objectives of its "parent" department. The GIS section is, simply, a service provider.
    "Most of our support to PZB and other agencies involves generating maps for a variety of purposes," says Goldstein. "We perform all the queries and create the maps."
    With the growing strength of the system, it was time to share the wealth.

A Hostage Situation Turned Loose
Goldstein recognized the power of the GIS and felt it should be open to more hands. "Being able to do GIS work is great. But I feel like we've been holding the GIS hostage up here. The system would be more effective if people could perform their own queries and create their own maps."
    And so it began 2 years ago that Goldstein set out to develop a data distribution infrastructure that would allow more users to directly access the GIS and perform their own spatial analyses.
    "The value and profitability of GIS are attained when you distribute the data to people," she explains. "With a distributed GIS network, a planner can query the database directly from his desktop computer, make the necessary map himself and send it to the plotter. That's a request we would no longer have to do. The hours that we might have spent on that project are now hours that we can dedicate to developing something new or automating another project."

Opening the Windows
To reach that end, Goldstein is employing Imagineer, GeoMedia, and GeoMedia Web Map. The latter serves initially as the basis for an operational Intranet and will allow the section to transition the Intranet into a public Internet site this summer.
    The building division is one area that is a perfect candidate for Imagineer and will benefit from its integration, says Goldstein. A 2D CAD software product using Windows technology, Imagineer will make permitting and assigning addresses for the building division more streamlined.
    Building permit technicians constantly search county plats, or subdivision locations, either to fulfill permitting requests or to answer queries regarding permitted lots. Prior to Imagineer, the 8,000 plats covering the unincorporated county were archived in paper form and manually updated. That has made it difficult for the technicians to efficiently service their customers.
    To improve permitting procedures, all plats within the unincorporated county were scanned and saved in digital form. Query fields based on how the technicians manually search for plats were implemented in the Oracle database. Using a Visual Basic interface to link the plats to the GIS, users will choose the plat book and page for the plat they need and Imagineer will retrieve the data. They can simply view the plat, access databases containing flood zone or TAZ information that will be linked to that plat, or edit the plat directly from a desktop. The information can then be printed in seconds.
    "What we're doing is not only taking a manual procedure and automating it, we're really streamlining it as well," says Goldstein. "The plat that once touched five hands during the creation process, will now touch only one. One person can enter in all the data. And since the information now sits on a server, ten people can simultaneously access the same plat ."
    Gone, too, will be the manual process of assigning addresses for the unincorporated regions of the county. The drafting pencils, rulers and erasers once used to add and edit addresses on plats have been replaced with desktop computers, keypads, and software.
    The zoning department can also use Imagineer, GeoMedia, and the digital orthophotos to automate zoning procedures. Similar to the former lives of permit technicians, zoning professionals have to endure the time-consuming process of creating and storing paper copies of zoned areas. Once the plat project is completed and the department progresses to the digital age, zoning staff will have the resources to respond to customers more efficiently. The software provides the framework to view and download the digital orthophotos, to verify property assessments, and to create or update zoning information quickly and accurately.
    For the person responsible for disseminating flood zone information to the variety of interested parties during Florida's hurricane season, this will be the first year that he probably won't drown from the flood of calls. Using MGE and GeoMedia Web Map, the GIS staff put the flood zone dataset on the internal Web site. With the information on the Intranet, he can quickly retrieve data on any area by using a few simple query fields.
    So when hurricanes rip through Palm Beach from June until November, he'll be able to respond to the requests about property and environmental damages from emergency crews, insurance companies and Realtors while they're still on the telephone. When the Internet is operational, the insurance companies and Realtors will be able to obtain their own data from their own computers, which will further reduce the call volume into the PZB department.
    But sharing the GIS wealth hasn't been confined to just the PZB departments. Other government agencies in the county have been introduced to the concept of GIS by experiencing the section's GIS first-hand. That experience has led some agencies to begin their own GIS revolution.

Revitalizing Palm Beach County
GIS was not an acronym that any officer would find in a procedure or operation manual at the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office. Until that is, the sheriff's office became involved in the Lake Worth Corridor Pilot Project 2 years ago.
    "That's when I was introduced to Donna Goldstein and the GIS section," says Captain Michael Gauger, one of the project leaders for the program. "And that's how I first learned about GIS."
    The Lake Worth Project began in May 1995 with an objective to aesthetically and economically revitalize the Lake Worth Corridor (LWC), a small, impoverished area south of West Palm Beach. Local residents voiced their concerns about the growing number of criminal complaints both to the police department and to their political representatives. A drug trade was proliferating in the area. Property and violent crimes were increasing. Residents didn't feel safe walking in the neighborhood-even during the day. One too many cries for a solution caused County Commissioner Warren Newell to take action -and the Lake Worth Corridor Pilot Project was born.
    They formed a task force of people from fifteen different government agencies, including the GIS section and the sheriff's office. The group had 1 year to investigate the effectiveness of the existing programs in the area, and to develop strategies to improve any deficiencies.
    For the GIS section, that meant performing all the analyses and creating all the maps for the fifteen different agencies involved. In total, that equated to about 18 maps.
    For the sheriff's office, that meant studying the productivity of a community policing program the agency implemented in the LWC in late 1994. Capt. Gauger was confident that the neighborhood watch groups and other community programs were producing positive results. He had already witnessed the power of community policing in other areas such as Dyson Circle and Stacy Street, residential areas in the central part of eastern Palm Beach County, where crime was reduced dramatically through the tenacity of the residents and police. But it was hard to convey that success to county commissioners with just words. The GIS provided the means to visually confirm what he knew to be true.
    A two month endeavor ensued to correctly match the addresses provided by the sheriff's office to the addresses in the GIS. That completed, Gauger listed eighty different crimes to statistically analyze. Those crimes were grouped into five different categories (such as crimes against property and crimes against persons) for the statistical analysis. Using MGE, they compared the level of crime and the concentration of crime in October 1994, when the community programs were first implemented, with the same criteria in August 1995.
    "The analysis clearly showed that we had reduced complaints of criminal offenses by 84% in an eight-month period," says Gauger. And he reports that the incidence of crime continues to decrease in the LWC. The success of these community programs in LWC and other areas stimulated new community policing programs in seventeen other areas in the county.
    Gauger says that the results from the GIS not only proved that community policing is a viable concept, but it gave him the chance to learn about GIS and understand its value to an organization such as his.
    "When you can visually show officers how their efforts are helping to produce a positive difference in a neighborhood, that makes an impact on them," he says. "When you inform officers that a particular area is experiencing a lot of auto burglaries and you can produce a map to show them exactly where the incidents are occurring, that gets their attention."
    As a result of this project, the sheriff's office obtained its own MGE workstation and is planning to develop its own GIS to monitor crime, to produce crime statistics, and to plan-when necessary-community programs for other neighborhoods. Given that, it's likely that officers will not only find a GIS operation's manual in the sheriff's office, but the agency will have its own GIS division by 1999.

More T-Shirts To Come?
The GIS section of the PZB department will likely look much different come 1999 as well.
    More hardware and software, particularly GeoMedia v.2.0 is planned for integration to increase the functionality of the system. Goldstein's goal is to continually improve the GIS network and to disseminate the data to an ever-increasing user base. That is, in short, what a GIS is for, she says.
    Given her tenacity and drive, the PZB department's GIS itself might need a "I survived Donna Goldstein" t-shirt.

About the Author:
Mary Jo Wagner is a freelance writer based in the U.K. She specializes in reporting on the GeoTechnologies and may be reached at [email protected]

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