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Project Goal
Baldwin County Alabama, like many other coastal communities, is experiencing tremendous growth. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2003 estimate put Baldwin County’s population at151,831 and it is expected to reach 300,000 by the year 2020. The population growth from April 1, 2001 to July 1, 2003 was 8.1%, nearly 7% higher than the state average. Baldwin County is the fastest growing county in Alabama.
Such growth strains infrastructure and presents tough decisions to those responsible for planning for the future. Against this backdrop, the County investigated and implemented a $4 million GIS project in 1996 with the goal of building a distributed GIS system to facilitate the increased efficiency of County Government.
In order to take advantage of the spirit of cooperation found here in the County, regular User Forum meetings were started to provide stakeholders (Board of Education, Fire Districts, Municipalities and E911) a mechanism to get together to share information, ideas and solutions.
Baldwin County recently installed dark fiber between all satellite courthouses and other critical County facilities. This effectively provided a means to someday offer a one-stop high speed GIS solution to all County GIS partners and effectively puts the ‘roof’ on the building of the distributed GIS.
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Business Problem Solved
The County helps users solve critical business problems by providing out of the box GIS software, and custom targeted GIS applications to produce custom datasets, analysis, mapping and map products. All users leverage the vast GIS data collected in the 1996 and subsequent flyovers.
Out of the box ArcInfo and ArcGIS are used daily on any number of business issues, such as those below:
• zoning maps
• sex offender locations
• hurricane evacuation routes
• driveway and structure addressing
• flood zone determination
• verifying issues and claims brought before the Commission
• wetlands determination
• Commission redistricting
• voting precinct changes
• parcel mapping
• hurricane support
• logistics and relief mapping
• crime scene location and rendering
• drainage easement calculations
• communicating evidence to juries
The above list is certainly not all inclusive, but, as evidenced by the variety of uses above, GIS has permeated the business culture at Baldwin County.
Examples of custom applications written by County Staff include Bridge View (bridge inspection information, location and photographs), Watershed Generator (on demand generation of watersheds based on County LiDAR data), and Remote Wetland Functional Assessment Model (assigns value to wetlands based on spatial relationships). GAMA (Geographic Aided Mass Appraisal) is a contractor application written application that does property valuations and reappraisal determinations.
Technology Implemented
Since 1996 Baldwin County has used a variety of technology solutions that have become the system currently in place. ArcInfo on a single user Unix box, evolved into the mixture of ArcInfo, ArcGIS, ArcIMS that is being used now. Reliance on INFO databases evolved into Librarian and into SDE 9/Microsoft SQL Server 2000 geodatabases. Plans are to implement a SAN (Storage Area Network) where all planimetric and raster data from the 1996, 2001 and 2005 flyovers can be stored in SDE.
Custom built ArcIMS applications currently provide a number of different intranet users access to Baldwin County spatial data. Each tailored browser meets the differing needs of departments such as Planning, Building Inspection, Revenue Commissioner. A General Viewer was developed for every day purposes. These ArcIMS viewers are to also serve as a springboard for developing internet map services for the general public.
The current hardware and software environment allows Baldwin County to implement a true eGIS (Enterprise GIS) where people, interoperable GIS software, and a powerful, accessible Relational Database Management System combine to provide GIS services to a wide variety of users.
Development Team Biography
The 2005 edition of the Baldwin County GIS Staff includes Bill Harbour – Information System Manager/GIS Coordinator, Sarah Pool – GIS Analyst II, and Satyasai Vaddadi – Analyst II.
Since 1996 many people have contributed to the making of this system. They include, but are not limited to:
Current and Past Baldwin County Commissions,
Phil Nix, Baldwin County Revenue Commissioner,
David Pimperl Communication and Information Systems Director,
Linda Phillips Baldwin County Revenue Commission Adminstrator of Mapping/GIS,
and Sandy Bailey Baldwin County Revenue Commission Mapping Supervisor.
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