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New Jersey Pinelands Commission

Project Goal

The State of New Jersey Pinelands Commission is a land-use planning and regulatory agency that oversees development and natural resource protection through the enforcement of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan within the million-acre Pinelands National Reserve of southern New Jersey. In order to accomplish this mission, the Commission relies on several separate databases.

The Development Review database which tracks and records all aspects of the land development process, the Zoning database which manages all of the land use designations as approved by the municipality and that conforms to the Commission's standards, the Violations database which is responsible for tracking all of the individual land owners who failed to comply with the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan, and the Geographic Information System database which is responsible for land use analysis, spatial data creation, and cartography.

Business Problem Solved

Querying and displaying data across four separate systems was extremely difficult and inefficient, requiring hours of data export and manipulation resulting in mediocre or incomplete data sets. As a result, most of the analyses had many limitations and remained very basic in nature.

These limitations led the Commission to develop a comprehensive solution for its data connectivity problem, the Pinelands Commission Information System (PCIS). As proposed by the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory and the Management Information Systems Office, the new system will integrate all existing systems into one enterprise-wide system, based in Oracle and spatially enabled using ESRI’s geodatabase model.

With the help of Applied GIS from Schenectady, NY, the system is becoming a reality. The database design and use case analysis is complete and in July of 2004, the Zoning module for the PCIS went live. It is the first of four modules that will eventually make up the PCIS. The Zoning Module provides staff with zoning information for all 53 Pinelands municipalities. Through a series of graphic user interfaces and an intranet map service, zoning information is displayed, validated, and is readily available for the project review staff to analyze development applications by block and lot, dramatically increasing application processing.

In the fall of 2004 the Development Review and Violations modules will go live followed shortly by the Pinelands Development Credit module, a new database that will track the Transfer of Development Rights program. Even though the GIS is not considered its own module, it is completely integrated throughout the system providing and validating zoning, parcel, and other geographic information for each module, but always having the ability through ArcInfo and ArcView to perform analysis and model building exercises on all of the data within the PCIS.

Technology Implemented

Oracle 9i
ArcSDE 8.3
ArcInfo 8.3
VB.net
ArcIMS

Development Team Biography

Pinelands Staff
Russell Davis, AICP: GIS Administrator
David Rickert: GIS Specialist
John LaMacchia: MIS Administrator
Janet Pierce: MIS Principle Programmer

Consultant Staff
Larry Spraker: Vice President
Cindy Flass: GIS Programmer
Heidi Hammel: Oracle DBA