Back to SAG Winners 2004

Salt Lake City Public Utilities, Utah

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Project Goal

To have current accurate data for all our Utilities infrastructure at our desk top. We needed our systems (Water, Sewer, and Storm) available faster and with more power behind them. We needed to answer questions about our infrastructure quickly. This information would be used to keep our systems operatable, safe, cost effective and available for other applications. Example: (Homeland Security)

Business Problem Solved

Salt Lake City Public Utilities is the largest water and sewer utility in the State of Utah. We are also the largest City Storm system in the State. Our Storm Water Utility Layers include commercial parcels, pervious areas and building foot prints. Properties are discounted around 65% of there bill for meeting a .2 cfs discharge. In other words if they hold the water to a certain level during a large storm they are discounted. Our water, sewer and storm system are managed through the GIS.

Now every aspect of our business runs through our GIS in one way or another. We link to our billing system, so we know who live where and what we supply to them; our maintenance system is part of the GIS. We know who is working on what pipe and history of each segment of pipe or system.

Public Utilities is used for Home Land Security within our Department and through out the City. Since our records are always current we are used by the fire and police for protecting the public. During the 2002 Winter Olympics we were part of the security team by the Federal Government for mapping and technical support to keep the Games Safe.

We keep a current water model of our entire water system on our GIS. This is used for master planning for the future, tracing of our system incase of contaminates and homeland security. We can model where something could be heading and where it may have come into the system.

Salt Lake City Public Utilities GIS is its own division with in the Department. It manages the GIS, Survey and Locating sections with in the department. Everything that has to do with mapping and data about the systems is done through the GIS Division. We are a survey Grade GPS base site. The as builts are created by the surveyors, the GIS professionals then update the attributes and map it out.

The locators are part of (Blue Stake) or one call. They have to mark out in the road our water, sewer, storm mains and services. They now pull up the data out in the field using our GIS maps. They respond to around 3,000 locates per month

Technology Implemented

Arcstorm now SDE for SQL Data base. Arcinfo Workspace and Desktop. Haestad WaterGem for water modeling. ArcIMS for Web mapping. CATS HPAC, with Cameo and Aloha for Homeland Security

Development Team Biography

Nick Kryger, GIS & IT Manager
Tammy Wambeam, GIS Analyst
Brandon Arnold, GIS Specialist
Dan Rivers, GIS Specialist
Travis Stringham, GIS Specialist
Trica Cannon, GIS Specialist
Dennis Varney, GIS Technician