User Conference 2002 - Special Achievement in GIS

Back to SAG Winners 2002

Public Utilities of Brownsvile (PUB)

Develop a full featured GIS to assist the Utility and the City of Brownsville in taking advantage of currently available and future applications.

Business Problem

The Brownsville Public Utilities Board had purchased the Genasys system in 1994 and incurred extensive problems when Genasys went out of business. The GIS group, after selecting ESRI, was tasked with upramping the entire GIS including SDE, Oracle and IMS. Datasets including the electric infrastructure, water and wastewater assets, base map information, specifically orthophotography and planimetric data. Verticle information in the form of Lidar data, soils data and various other datasets were procured. The final result is an exremely accurate database capable of fufilling the original expectations and more.

Technology Implemented

Relational Database - Oracle
RDBI - SDE
Mapping applications:Arcview 3.2, Arc/Info 8x, Arc/Map 8x, Arc/IMS, Arc/FM energy, QC view, Stoner(Synergy)
Additional applications: Trimble (pathfinder)GPS
Applications under current consideration include; Azteca(Cityworks), Miner& Miner(Designer)&(Feeder manager) modeling systems for the water and wastewater systems

Development Team Biography

David Bartle - GIS Manager B.S. Geography Penn State 1982
Worked in the areas of Aerial mapping and Civil Engineering until 1987. In 1987 Mr. Bartle joined CAD associates and became project manager and base mapping coordinator. In 1990 he was selected by Geomap Company to head up the new GIS department where among other projects developed a nationwide dataset of the oil and gas fields in the continental U.S. Mr. Bartle then worked with the EPA until joining BPUB in 2000.
Sonia Gover - Graduated from UT Brownsville in 1998. Sonia had been working for BPUB since 1994 in the electrical department. Sonia first started developing the GIS in 1994 with the Genasys system and has continued to expand the GIS for the electrical department.
Jaime Villarreal - Began working in the water/wastewater department in 1983. In 1994 he became involved with GIS and assisted in working with the Genasys software. In 1999 after selection of ESRI as the GIS software he began to develop the water and wastewater dataset and has been instrumental in the success of the project.