| Out in Front
The use of GIS is allowing govenment agencies in Las Vegas, Nevada
to stay on top of the city and county's exponential growth
By Tom Lively Nevada, in Spanish signifying snow clad, or covered with snow, was nicknamed the "Silver State," and also called the "Sagebrush State." It is the seventh largest state yet has one of the smallest populations. Covering a land area of more than 110,000 square miles, it is vastly scattered with abandoned buildings from its past boom and bust era of old mining towns reminiscent of the great silver finds of the 1860s. As recent as sixty years ago, Nevada had less than one person per square mile of total state population. Originally inhabited by numerous Indian tribes, such as the Washoe, Shoshoni, and Mohave nations, today it has evolved and grown to one of this country's most visited states and greatest centers of entertainment.
Nevada possessed only 1/6th of the necessary population requirement to obtain statehood from Congress in 1864. Nevertheless, President Abraham Lincoln, urgently needing financial help for the looming Civil War, and political help for votes for his passion against slavery, declared on October 31st, Nevada to be the 36th State. The President's gamble and perhaps first proverbial throw of the dice won him the one vote necessary for ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Although most states today have allowed gaming, Nevada remains the uncontested dice capital of the world.
During the 1980s Nevada grew by 50%, more than any other state in the U.S. And in Nevada's most major city, Las Vegas, the population has experienced an even greater boom. From 1980 to 1997 the city's residency has leaped from 160,000 to over 1.2 million. This makes Nevada the fastest growing state for the 12th consecutive year. With an annual state growth rate of nearly 5%, more than five-times the national average, and the Las Vegas metropolitan statistical area (MSA) enjoying more than a 40% population growth, thus far in the '90s, government officials have had to rely upon the most up-to-date information management technologies available. Although Nevada is only the 37th most populous state, such explosive growth-and the consequential infrastructures necessary to support that growth-is challenging this.
Even in the face of these challenging times of expansion, visitors and newcomers alike are welcomed with a Western smile. State, county, and city officials aren't worried at all. In fact, for all its agencies, today its open arms from the "City-of-Lights" for all that come or just visit. Las Vegas has become a mecca of expansion within the Nevada Great Basin.
One reason for this governmental confidence is the common belief that where there is population growth, there will also be economic growth. These are intertwined, and rarely do you find one without the other. Which comes first? Or, what causes what? The answer is always in time and place! From geographical region to region, the specific reasons for growth and subsequent prosperity will vary. Not all expanding cities of comparable growth are of equal interest to surveying companies. The quality and educational levels of a city's labor force can be a major factor of variation between regions. The frequently cursory measurement of the "quality of life," or an area's wage standards, or the region's spending behavior may vary greatly from one time to another and from place to place. All this ultimately affects the level of corporate interest within the decision process to move or expand to a new location, thus impacting that locality's social and economic spheres.
With regard to labor, Las Vegas is unique! Only about 6% of its jobs are in manufacturing. By contrast, over 80% of the city's employment opportunities are in the fields of entertainment and tourism. Additional hotels, resorts and casinos continue to be built every year, due in part to this vast and specifically trained labor pool. Today, there are more hotel rooms in the city of Las Vegas than the entire state's population just six decades ago. With more than 105,000 rooms and 20,000 plus under construction, Las Vegas sees no end to its present growth rate. Across the country, the increase of legal gambling is causing the planners and developers of Las Vegas to rethink an overall strategy. The city is retooling itself to also become a new west-world theme park for non-gaming kids and adults visiting the city as tourists seeking resort relaxation, or conventioneers attending one of its 3,800 plus events per year.
The city's population growth, to some measurable extent, is attributed to the overall economic success of Las Vegas. After all, more than 31 million people will visit Las Vegas this year. Twenty-nine percent will be first-time visitors. Nineteen percent will be international visitors. All of whom will collectively leave more than $25 billion of economic impact for the city. The city-wide hotel occupancy is over 90%, and 86% for the city's motels. These rates are the highest in the country. But, is the fastest growing city, county, and state due only to economic profiles? Not likely! There must first exist an environment conducive to allowing rapid growth to occur smoothly and in a manageable manner.
Many cities and counties compete every year for economic growth and position. They market themselves in many innovative ways, attempting to attract the next wave of corporate relocations. In today's economy, with the advent of the information age, high technologies, the digital revolution and advanced communications, fewer corporations find themselves geographically bound. This newly found corporate latitude consequently places cities in the position of courting most companies with attractive incentive packages to relocate to their area and citing all manners of advantageous demographic reasons. Yet, in the case of Las Vegas, a major contributing factor to the city and county's success is the early commitment both governing bodies showed to the utilization of advanced geographical information systems (GIS) technology. City and county officials can guarantee with confidence that as the city continues to grow so will its infrastructure, no matter what the final numbers expand to. This confidence is rooted in the vision and abilities of the county and city managers responsible for acquiring, storing, managing, organizing, and disseminating all public and private property characteristic data.
GIS technology permits city and county officials to effectively manage resources, in terms of land, water, and other area assets. Controlling and managing the pressures of rapid change could not otherwise be so quickly and accurately accomplished without the constant assistance of automated mapping, data integration, and property information management implemented through the county's GIS services. This technology assures that city and county GIS user agencies and departments maintain a quality of life which is the same as when the population of Clark County and Las Vegas was half or a third the current size.
Anticipating future growth and planning strategies to successfully deal with the management of that growth are the principal responsibilities that face every city and county government throughout the country. Las Vegas and Clark County have clearly stood up to these challenges. The business of local government is to provide information to both business people and its residents. Its job is to grant building permits, issue warnings for development activities, address the needs of neighborhoods, businesses, schools, public utilities, and maintain safe and adequate streets and roads.
Was GIS technology implemented because of the explosive growth of the city of Las Vegas? Did the access of the diversified applications created by the GIS implementation for official services produce an environment readied for booming growth? Have corporate decision makers, considering relocation, recognized the merit and value of the city and county's long range planning capabilities due to their implementation of GIS? Certainly the answer is yes to all of these contributing factors. Like the "chicken and egg" argument, it is impossible to project what comes first or is most principal. However, it is obvious today that without leadership's prior vision to install and utilize GIS technology, the county and city would not have been able to support their boom in the accurate and remarkably ordered manner they have.
Last year at AM/FM International's Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, David R. Edwards, the director of GIS at Clark County, was presented the AM/FM Excellence Award at the opening session. The county has been using and developing automated digital mapping and GIS technologies for 18 years. Today, its GIS applications are used by almost all county departments. Clark County's GIS provides a wide variety of disciplines for multiple agencies via a cooperative data sharing program. Local agencies including area municipalities, utility districts, and school districts benefit from the county's GIS consortium. In 1992 Robert Kelly, the then deputy county assessor and assessment mapping Supervisor enthusiastically showed off the thousands of assessor parcel map sheets being processed for digitization conversion into the county's GIS database. Today's reality is that the city and county's foresight in investing into tomorrow's information advancements has indeed dramatically played a role in the ability of the local government officials to capably manage their booming growth from the employment of their automated digital mapping systems.
Government agencies are not the only users of electronic mapping and GIS data- bases, however. Countless lists of applications have now been adopted by a host of GIS users. In November 1991, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, REMAP Corp. of St. Paul, Minnesota exhibited at the National Realtors Association (NAR), an electronic mapping system. It was the only product of its kind, amid hundreds of show exhibitors. The program called IRIS (Integrated Realty Information System), permits any commercial listing or residential property multiple listing (MLS) to be geo-coded and displayed on its associative assessor's tax parcel base map. With an intelligent GIS map base, tax roll data, population census data, reverse phone directory numbers, property characteristics, points of interest, and MLS listings may all be integrated into the single IRIS service, offered over the Internet. REMAP's IRIS program is unique among real estate mapping programs and on-line services by offering a picture of every property, regardless of if it is listed or not. Also, the IRIS service displays a MSA's entire seamless contiguous GIS interactive parcel map base for Realtor agents and brokers to query. Although in 1991 at NAR REMAP exhibited the only map-based MLS remote access program, last November in New Orleans, the 1997 NAR conference had more than 30 mapping products on display. The growth of technology in the real estate industry for the last five years has been paramount. Dr. Michael Abelson, a seminar presenter at the '97 NAR conference told his audience, "Technology is our number one trend today and looking to the year 2000. A computer in the year 2000 will be as essential to the real estate agent as the telephone is today. If you don't have a computer, you will not be able to do business." Obviously to most, the Internet and satellite communications with telecommunication links will play an enormous role in the future of real estate transactions, both commercial and residential.
In June 1996, armed with their GIS software program, Tom Kovarik came to Las Vegas from northern Minnesota to open a REMAP office and establish the IRIS service for the greater Clark County area. This meant acquiring, assembling, and developing an enormous amount of property data. The commercial, industrial, and residential property information was then integrated to the County's GIS digital assessor tax parcel map base. "Murphy's Law" generally rules at most new implementations and this effort was no exception. Kovarik reported, "Some of our equipment had suffered damage in shipping that did not become apparent until the system was up and running. The problems resulted in the program hanging for the users. It had the same characteristics as bad phone lines and took quite some time to identify and correct, resulting in some initial frustration on everyone's part." Fortunately, thanks to REMAP's senior program developer Jeff Hoffmann, at the company's headquarter office in St. Paul, Minnesota, the system has gotten better and better. From Kovarik's first system installation in October 1996 for David Ferradino, president of Interstate Mortgage Company, to today, nearly two hundred IRIS licenses have been subscribed to. The steady growth of a robust, comprehensive, totally integrated GIS mapping service for the local real estate agents and brokers has convinced the managers of REMAP that this is the technology direction for the future of Realtor's MLS services. Clearly, city government and county government agencies recognize the power of GIS technologies to manage rapid growth and also plan for continuing booming growth. Realtors also, within any fast growing community, professionally require more information, more quickly, more timely, and via a user- friendly medium.
The National Association of Realtors, in their April 1993 study: "Future Trends & Policy on Technology in The Real Estate Business" reported, "The development of GIS broadens the information that an MLS can provide. Instead of simply looking at screens or printouts of comparative listings, a GIS displays data on a map and provides a discrete geographical context to view the information. Now real estate professionals can actually view neighborhood patterns of home sales. Clients and customers no longer have to imagine how close they are to mountains, rivers, schools, shopping centers and other amenities; they can see the distance proximity relationships on a computer-generated map." Like city and county government staff, local Realtors in the Las Vegas area are utilizing GIS technology without prior digital-cartographic training or knowledge, due to the ease of use of REMAP's IRIS service.
Since August of last year, REMAP has shifted its real estate IRIS service from a local remote access WAN (Wide Area Network) system to its present Internet access service. When Zoe Schoppa began with REMAP for the Las Vegas office in September of 1996, she had to go out to a client's place of business and physically install the IRIS software program on each of their personal computers. However, today, due to the continued national growth of the Internet user base by Realtors and other property transaction professionals, REMAP's thin-client IRIS program may be downloaded directly from any Realtor's homepage in cyberspace.
Realtors find themselves today in an industry squeezed by marketplace demands, escalating regulations, and confronting powerful technological changes. Property sales require a proactive as opposed to a reactive selling professional. An agent now must be more mobile, more specific, more efficient, and provide a faster response than yesterdays' "good-old boys" smile, hand shake, and wink paradigm. Things are changing! The Internet is leading the impact on the real estate industry. Just as new information technologies like GIS have allowed city and county personnel to adjust and manage rapid growth; so also is the "Information Highway" and its associate digital revolution permitting Realtors to effectively respond to new market demands. About the Author:
Tom Lively is vice president, director GIS Development for REMAP Corporation, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Back |
