EOM April 2005 > SHARING IN GEOTECHNOLOGIES

Making Partnerships Work : The Metro Nashville Experience

by Kim McDonough



Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County, Tennessee (Metro) has been a consolidated city and county government since 1963. The approximately 530 square miles of highly varied terrain and land use is home to 569,891 people (2000). Nashville is the state capital and derives significant economic revenues from the large number of state and federal government offices in the city. Metro continues to grow at a healthy rate which results in a fairly dynamic cultural geography.

Metro launched its GIS in 1987 and has enhanced it over time to keep up with the demands of a constantly changing landscape. In 2003, Metro began a program to obtain full color, 1 foot resolution, digital orthophotography on an annual basis. By using existing control and a DTM built in 2000 by Kucera International (Willoughby, OH), the city/county was able to take delivery of the imagery within 90 days of its initial capture. The base layer provided an accurate picture of our changing landscape that was affordable and timely.

USGS Knocks
At the same time the new ortho program began, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) approached Metro about a possible partnership. Initially, USGS, acting on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), had conducted a survey of what data was on file, its condition, and whether it was available for sharing. Nashville was of interest to NGA as a result of its 133 urbanized areas initiative and USGS was looking for opportunities to add data to The National Map. USGS was particularly interested when it learned of the quality of the data and that Metro was interested in pursuing cost sharing partnerships.

Negotiations
As negotiations began, both sides realized some compromises would be necessary. NGA was interested in half foot resolution. However, Metro would have to amend its existing contract to obtain the tighter resolution and was reluctant to do that because NGA did not need annual imagery. Metro did have 1-foot resolution "in the can," and true to the analogy of "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush," NGA and USGS believed this resolution would serve their purposes. The data, it turned out, was already in process for that year.

Other points of compromise revolved around the extent of the imagery and its distribution. Because Metro is essentially a county government, it is unable to contract for any services beyond the county boundary. NGA was interested in regional imagery. But again, since the Metro imagery was already in existence, NGA representatives were agreeable with the more limited extent.

The distribution issues had to be worked out with the USGS. NGA had no real interest in distribution, but USGS was very interested in using the Metro imagery as part of The National Map. The problem here is that Metro licenses its data to a number of companies for distribution in value added products. Metro felt it necessary to protect these licensees' investment in the data and was reluctant to release this imagery so that it would compete with these companies. The USGS respected these concerns and proposed to withhold the 2003 imagery from the public domain until after the 2004 imagery was delivered. This turned out to be an acceptable solution for Metro. With the delivery of the 2004 imagery, the 2003 data was no longer current and so any negative impact on the licensees was avoided or at least minimized.

What clenched the deal for Metro was USGS' generous financial contribution. This helped ensure that Metro would have the resources to continue with the annual imagery updates. Thus, USGS and NGA got the data they needed at a fraction of the cost and effort required for them to do it themselves, while Metro was given a strong incentive to continue its program.

A Habitat for Humanity subdivision (Providence Park) showed significant change within an approximately 12-month time period. The 2003 image is on the left, 2004 on the right.

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