A tornado hit Calhoun County, AL on April 27, 2011 and in just two weeks, Calhoun County geographic information systems manager Robert Scheitlin put up a Web map showing the damage. It was widely used in the recovery efforts.
In May, Scheitlin received statewide recognition for his work when Auburn University Montgomery honored him with a Digital Government Innovation award. Scheitlin’s work beat three other contenders, including the Piedmont city school system, which was nominated for dispensing MacBooks to each child in grades four through 12.
Tech: ArcGIS API for Flex plus some new $27k costing imagery.
Roanoke County, VA has some tax issues:
County Administrator Clay Goodman said officials know some of the sale prices are incorrect. That happened because the GIS system uses the value listed with recordation tax. That tax is based on either a property's sale price or its assessed value, whichever is higher. The sale price was usually higher until the housing bubble burst and caused a situation in which property might be purchased for lower than the assessed price. So in some cases the GIS system lists a sale price as higher than what was paid.
What's interesting to me is that all the calculation seem to be done in the GIS, not in the assessing software. That led to this headline: "Roanoke County GIS system posts incorrect housing prices." The other interesting point on this? One of the supervisors could not believe the problem was found so quickly. "He questioned how the taxation department could evaluate the system after spending just two days looking into the situation."
Three years ago, MAGIC began a project with the Office of Long Island Sound Programs to provide a better way to distribute more than 6,000 color infrared aerial photographs of the Connecticut shoreline taken from 1974 through 2000. By creating digital indexes that represent the location and extent of what the photos show on the ground and associating them with scanned images of the original photos, the indexes can leverage several ways to allow users access from their homes or offices at their convenience.
And, now they are available!
The digital indexes are available to the public from the MAGIC GIS data page, and users can view individual aerial images through downloadable GIS datasets as well as with Google Earth-friendly KML files and a custom interactive map interface.
