MINUTES OF THE GIS TECHNICAL ADVISORY TEAM MEETING:
OCTOBER 20, 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chairperson Dan Swartzendruber called the GIS Technical Advisory Team Committee to order in the Johnson County Administration Building at 9:09 a.m. Johnson County Elected Officials, Department Heads, and Staff present were: Kim Painter, Jean Schultz, Jeff Huff, Todd Kruse, Dan Swartzendruber, Rick Havel, Bill Greazel, Jose Flores, Pat Harney, Mark Kistler, John McKiness, Sally Stutsman, and Danelle Essing
GIS Coordinator Rick Havel: We are taping this meeting for historical purposes. I don’t have a copy of the agenda handy but there are three main items on there: plan review, which is essentially the GIS working plan and getting that updated; talking about FY 06 budget allocations or requests that we’re going to put together, or have been working on; and the parcel database. First of all we need to get a minute taker appointed. Anybody want to volunteer for that? Todd?
Real Estate Clerk Todd Kruse: I can do that.
Havel: All right. Thanks Todd. We’ll get those compiled and sent out to the entire TAT meeting and membership.
Havel: I think we’re going to rearrange what we discuss. I think Mark needs to get back down. Correct? So we’re going to move parcel database up from fifth to third. Essentially I guess I’ll start it and if Mark wants to carry on, then we can move on. Over the last month or so we’ve really been taking a hard look at what needs to be done to get that parcel database where it needs to be. And, I think over the last year we made a lot of strides to build a good framework for that type of activity. A lot of things have occurred over the last year, new databases, our new software, Invision, GEMS. We restructured the parcel database last winter, which carried over into the spring so that created a lot of delay in production. Training became a factor. We had to get people up to speed on the new system, get them trained and I think it was a learning experience. I thought it was something that we wanted to attempt to do in-house and obviously that is the way I think the Auditor’s staff feel they want to continue doing that, though it was a lot of my intent to do that as well, to keep it in that office, to keep it going, and moving along in that environment. Certain things that come up, and I think became a concern was the amount of time it takes to do the work now versus when it was done in AutoCAD. There’s a lot more tasks involved. There is a lot more thought involved. You really need personnel in those positions that one, have time to do it, and two, have the mindset to do it, and have the ability to absorb that technology. That is an important factor I think that we’ve learned over the last year or so, what it’s entailing. How much education, how much resource, and how much time it is going to take. Where I’m going with this is that in my opinion, some changes need to occur, and I’m going to let Mark discuss further what is going on and what their thoughts are. I’ve made some recommendations but we haven’t had time to discuss those fully with Tom. And I’m not going to go into detail on those, but over the last year, or just recently we put together a report that will help track progress in terms of the parcel database. I noticed currently there’s one error on here and I need to talk to Carl about it. But, there’s one column, that’s why I didn’t send that out, but for the most part it shows a percentage of the matching rate between parcels, the real estate database, and the polygon database, the GIS layer that pulls the two things together. You have the maps here, real estate here, and obviously at this point in time they don’t match because real estate has more records than the maps in terms of the match rate. This report will help us get a good grasp as far as progress. Are we getting those two databases to an equal state? That is obviously the goal, to get them there and keep them there over the long run. I think my emphasis is to continue doing it inside of Johnson County and not necessarily contract it out because although that is still a possible solution, to a certain degree, but to continue building the framework to support this database because it’s becoming more used and demand on it is growing by the public and by the departments inside of the County. It’s something that has a lot of value to it and it needs to continue to have that value and that credibility. At this point I’ll let Mark discuss anything he wants to discuss and we can move ahead.
Deputy Auditor Mark Kistler: We have consistently for a number of years asked for additional staffing to try to help keep up with the workload from GIS. For this years budget, since probably full time staffing wouldn’t be accepted, we did ask for additional part time temporary staff. It certainly has helped. We would be in a world of hurt without them. Part of the problem is that we have gone through a software conversion for the database, the Invision, that hasn’t been real smooth. The part time staff helped with that, they also helped with the GIS work load, to a certain degree. We can get part time temporary people trained, given time, to do certain basic tasks in GIS, and every little bit helps. Unfortunately by the time they get to be pretty decent at doing their job, they’re gone. What we would really like to see is a full time permanent position. John is real good at doing anything that needs to be done in GIS. Kathy we’d like to get up to speed, but unfortunately the work that has to be done in Invision in dealing with some of the survey problems and legal problems and so forth just swallows her up. So by the time she gets started in her GIS work she can’t get any further along than the part time temporary people. So, basically John is kind of on his own trying to do a lot of the more sophisticated tasks in GIS. We have for a number of years tried to split my position and get a separate GIS deputy because the tax side and dealing with the update of Invision issues, and taking care of credits and all the other things involved pretty much swallow up a majority of the time. Talking with Rick and also with Tom, we’ve discussed that maybe the thing we need to do to focus on is how we get help for John so that he doesn’t have the whole workload and can never catch up. We’ve been discussing, Rick and I, Tom and I, possibly submitting to the Board a request for a full time permanent position in GIS. So that’s basically where we are at.
Information Services Director Jean Schultz: I have a question. I know you said that the first time (inaudible) I don’t know how much part time help you’ve got. Is it more than an equivalent of a full time position?
Kistler: Yes, it is more than a full time position and we have allocated part of their time to helping Steve and Keshab with property tax transfers and platting and updating the day to day changes. Also, one of the things they do is when people come in wanting help finding real estate information, they produce maps for people, basic GIS mapping. The other thing is, the ones who show the most skill, then I assign them to John and he teaches them how to enter the COGO information into tables that then create the parcels for him. He can use that data and do some basic QA/QC of the work he does. But we have quite a few hours. Right now we have five part time temporaries so it has helped a lot. But right now we’re almost a month behind on some of the day to day upkeep of records. At the rate we’re going we will never catch up, quite frankly.
County Assessor Bill Greazel: Can you catch up with just what you’re doing, or the backlog?
Kistler: We’re trying to focus on some of the oldest work first and try to get that caught up or focus on particularly the ag parcels that you’re looking for and the City has got a particular situation we’ll try to focus on the highest priority. But they keep coming in so the amount of subdividing going on and surveying of new parcels is incredible. You know that. It does not slow down.
Greazel: What’s the projection if you have a full time person? How soon would you be caught up?
Kistler: Rick would you have any idea?
Havel: I hate to say it. I don’t know. A year or a year and a half.
Stutsman: With a full time person?
Havel: With a full time person.
Kistler: Maybe if we got caught up then we could reduce our part-time temporary hours.
Schultz: My question is too then if you’re going to take on an additional fulltime person would it be helpful to convert some of the part time hours for a fulltime position?
Kistler: I would say that I would like to wait until we get caught up to switch those hours because then all of that work that they’re doing now gets shifted to somebody else, whether its Kathy or Steve and Keshab. Basically it would create a ripple effect that John and the new person end up doing some of the things that Kathy is doing now, so it reduces their hours. I would hope that we could keep the part time temporary hours for at least a year.
Schultz: What I meant was having a basically equal amount would make it a full time position (inaudible).
Kistler: I think that would be great. I would hope that we could get a years lag so that we could actually catch up.
Assistant Planner Dan Swartzendruber: If you were caught up today could you keep up with the current staff?
Kistler: No. That’s the problem. I don’t think we can.
Swartzendruber: Because there is just too much coming in on a daily basis to…
Map Delineator John McKiness: There’s so much to do. There are so many ways that we need to go to do other things to improve the system besides just catching up.
Greazel: What kinds of things?
Kistler: We spend a lot of time creating plat book pages and platting properties. We need to create more of an online GIS platting application. That’s going to take some time. We’ve got to do some things. The Invision database only has one book and page. We need to be able to be able to show all of the books and pages for a property. That’s something we’ll have to work with Rick on.
McKiness: Finding out where the section lines are supposed to be at. Things like that.
Kistler: One of the things Rick is working on a pilot to GPS some section corners to get more accurate section corner locations. There is a lot of adjusting that we’ve done to the GIS where we’ve put it into temporary layer that the parcels are drawn in accurately but we haven’t made maps of adjustments to the older data around it because we don’t want to start warping the whole data set before we really have a handle on exactly where things should fit and we start getting some of the section corners, which were originally just digitized from aerial photos. So if it was digitized off a fence line on a 400 scale photo a tenth of an inch is 40 feet, so those section lines aren’t accurate. That’s one of the things we need to develop. That’s going to take some time. That’s not maybe as pressing as getting the parcel data in there, but that would be the next phase, to go back in and readjust all of that older data so that everything fits. It looks good. You can produce a map without those adjustments and it looks fine, but eventually we want to have a perfectly cohesive database.
Swartzendruber: So Mark, if you had one more FTE person that still wouldn’t get us caught up to that 2 year backlog, right?
Stutsman: We’re talking about 3 people though, aren’t we?
Swartzendruber: We’re talking about all of the part time staff, John, and then potentially a new one. So I guess that’s 3 FTE.
Kistler: Kathy does a lot of the working with Todd and Rhonda and Larry on doing the splits in Invision and also deals with a lot problems that come in…
Kruse: Mark, which I might add, on the splits with Invision from my perspective the Auditor has taken on a greater portion of that process, taken away from the Assessor just because Invision requires that the Auditor do a greater portion of it. What I do on Invision now, in comparison to the old system, is a fraction of what I used to do. They have to manage their value, a whole separate database. All I do is do our little bit in two screens and I’m done.
Kistler: We never did anything with the current year values. We have current year values that we’re going to do rollbacks implementation on and get the valuation information out to people. We used to never do anything with that other than track the changes the Assessors made. Now, with the new system, they have to tell us what values to put on there and we have to go in and put the values back on for the current year. It basically doubles the work because they still have to figure out what the values are but then we’re doing a lot of input.
Schultz: Can we get them security so that they can still do that even though it’s going into your file?
Kistler: Not under the current setup. We’ve talked to them about it and I think they’re going to have to do some programming changes to be able to do that.
Harney: But they could do that if the programming changes are put in place. There’s nothing to prevent it.
Kruse: We had a discussion with CMS a week ago or so and that didn’t really get discussed in depth when we were up there. I got the impression though that you would almost have to change the whole way that system works for them to allow us to have selective access to that database. I got the impression that they weren’t necessarily willing to entertain that.
Kistler: It might though if they get more large counties. But I think that with most counties it’s not that big a deal.
Schultz: Because they’re smaller.
Kistler: Yes, they don’t have that much activity.
Greazel: It seems like this big backlog that we’re dealing with… Are you still open to the idea? Or, have you ever been open to the idea that we farm that out to some company that does it so that we can at least get caught up with our two year time lag to hire somebody...
Kistler: I would be open to it, but I would be cautious that there may be some clean up. One of the problems we have is when we did the conversion we tried to get things done quickly. It went well, it did get done fairly quickly and we got a system up and running so that Rick would have something to work with when he got here. But there wasn’t any sort of procedure for how to deal with the conversion errors. So we’re still dealing with conversion errors from the original conversion from the AutoCAD to the GIS. We had the funding to have some temporaries come in and go completely through every map that we had comparing the AutoCAD data and the GIS data looking for problems. We’ve got four or five notebooks full of errors that have been noted, but we never were given any funding to get extra help to actually go in and fix them. It’s something John is doing as he is working on an area, he’s fixing those. I’m just afraid when you farm something out like that, you get whatever you get and there may be more time later fixing some of the problems, but I would be open to it.
Greazel: We can have specifications.
Kistler: It’s better to go in and have to...
Greazel: I’ll share my perspective managing my people. If I had part of my people that were two years behind in the work I wouldn’t want the stress on my people.
Kistler: I’m definitely open to it but I just am aware that it’s not going to be a free pass when the data comes in.
Greazel: Sure, but it’s going to be a lot less.
Kistler: I’m definitely open to it.
Havel: In addition to that I think that there are some events occurring, especially in Planning and Zoning, in terms of the ordinance, that will require surveyors to submit digital versions of the plats. A tremendous amount of time spent by the map delineators is just creating the data initially, just drawing the surveys into the system, annotating the data with lot dimensions, attribution, such as assigning lot numbers and parcel numbers. We have streamlined a lot of that over the last few years. We’ve been able to mass attribute polygons with parcel numbers and lot numbers very quickly and easily. A lot quicker that it used to be done, but there are extra steps involved in getting that data into an annotation layer. What I’m getting at is that once the ordinance is in place, and we start seeing more of these digital versions, a lot of drawing time will be reduced and I think that will really help us get some progress made on this database. I think we definitely need two full time people. We need another clone of John. Two of him, and then getting those digital versions in should reduce a lot of time because we can take those digital versions and basically reverse engineer them to actually generate the legal dimensions and bearings and distances to verify that the plat is drawn correctly in the first place. And that’s a real quick process. We’ve put the framework and built databases that are ready to start accepting those digital versions. So it’s a matter of getting those lines worked and then it’s the process of getting it up into the system at least into the temporary layer is reduced immensely. Where a lot of the headache comes in, and I think Mark will agree, is making those judgment calls at the end. Accumulating the data is the easy part. Building the plats is time consuming, but it’s easy. It’s getting the system into the final adjustment and having a high confidence level that that’s where it’s supposed to be and that’s what it is in reality, compared to adjusting plats and so forth. There has been a lot of strides in getting the process simplified to the point where a lot of progress can be made. What that takes is someone that is experienced in using the tools and is dedicated because it is something they have to do on a regular basis. I think that is where Kathy has faltered because she has to go and do other things like parcel number assignments and work with the problem surveys, and she just hasn’t dedicated enough time to get up to full speed where we need her. But her functions are valuable and freeing those functions away from John, making John more in tune with pure database production has been helpful. It’s just that if progress is to be made, we need another person.
Kruse: If I could throw in, this time of year of course, with the election in there, I think it’s reasonable that if we’re going to get added resources that the Auditor’s Office commit to dedicating those resources only to GIS, i.e. during the presidential, they’re going to be six weeks into doing absentee ballot and presidential election work by the time its all said and done. That’s a huge chunk of time out of there. The only one that I can tell that is dedicated only to GIS stuff has been John. I’ve worked down there, I know how it kind of goes. I think we would need a commitment from Tom to say that this person won’t be pulled out, maybe the week of the election...
Kistler: OK, we can hold your payroll checks for a couple of weeks, so maybe we could have the payroll person help with satellite voting, or maybe not do AP checks or...
Kruse: I guess.
Kistler: We need everybody. We put a large amount of money in the budget for overtime for the election so if John or Kathy helped with satellite voting in the General Election, which is only every two years, they are putting a significant amount of time into it, which may be enough. How many days are you doing satellite voting? And it’s half days in a couple of cases.
McKiness: I try to avoid it.
Kistler: I know but...
McKiness: It’s the chaos of the office is the biggest problem.
Kistler: If they can’t find anybody, John may go out and do a satellite site.
Kruse: I understand that but...
Kistler: You know sometimes you have to spread it out. You just can’t let anybody get out of it.
Kruse: My concern is that, and maybe this isn’t a discussion for us necessarily because it’s at the director level. If you throw more resources in there he’s going to create more satellite voting sites, he’s going to throw all the resources to do satellite voting, which is what I observe. I partially experienced that when I went down there. The more resources he’s got, the more resources to do absentee balloting and early voting as it’s called, and so on and so forth. I just think that if we are going to get more resources in there, they are doing without another full time person now, and this was probably one of the biggest elections in recent history as far as activity down there, seems like it’s busier than anything right now. If you added that person I don’t know that you would take away from what the current level of support for the election would be.
Kistler: We’ve gone a pretty sizeable amount into overtime and I have basically told people in real estate you work whatever overtime you can manage, either for elections or in real estate. If they want to come in on Saturday and work real estate while we are so busy they can do that. We’re trying to help out and keep up with our own work as much as we can.
Kruse: And I know it’s out of your level and I don’t mean to dime you out or do any of that. To me it needs to be a commitment from Tom to say that we will not suck that resource into elections. The week of the election I know it goes haywire and there’s a lot of things going on, and that can be understood. But six weeks to seemingly block out any other activity.
Kistler: Let’s put it that way, other than the six weeks, John is focused...
Kruse: I know he’s the one exception that I can observe.
Kistler: We don’t side track him for other things. I’ve tried my very best to keep him out of anything that is a distraction and I would do the same thing with the other person.
Harney: The only thing I could say there is that if I’m going to put another person in there for GIS, I want them doing GIS. And if he wants to pay them overtime to do it beyond his eight hours worth I guess I wouldn’t have a problem with that. To me the principle here would be GIS, to get this caught up because it’s affecting the Assessors, it’s affecting our Treasurer. They’re running behind on their statements and they get all kinds of criticism from that and I think we just need to get caught up one way or another. I guess we need to take that up with Tom, not you.
Kistler: Yes. For the general election they bring in as many part-time temporary people as they possibly can, but it still takes everybody. I don’t know what to say other than there’s going to be some distraction from other duties but it’s going to be everybody and I don’t know if there’s an answer to that.
Havel: Bill wanted to say something.
Greazel: We transfer people from parts because sometimes they’re busy in this part and they will help out in residential or commercial. But it sounds to me, correct me if I’m wrong, that GIS stands in for these other projects but when the election is over are those people going to help out in GIS?
Kistler: Unfortunately no, because they don’t have the skills.
Greazel: Right, so it’s kind of a one way deal.
Kistler: And that’s why I tried to create no distractions for John other than the one exception would be a little bit of satellite voting when we’re really in a crunch. John and I have an understanding that he is the last person to volunteer, but if they are really desperate he will do it.
Greazel: It would be nice if it was a two way flow that if when the elections were over the elections people would help.
Kistler: Actually they do help occasionally help people find plats. They will help with some of the basic stuff which will free somebody else up to do something. Maybe one of our part time temporaries can do something like creating maps, that if they were busy helping a customer with plats, then maybe John would have to do the map. It all works out, everyone pitches in.
Greazel: But the level of expertise it takes to do what John does, you can’t bring people from accounting...
Kistler: Well, in elections, some people, like Harry, will help people with plats when they’re not busy. So, you know, it does work both ways.
Schultz: I have a couple of questions. One is the digital submittal that you guys are working on an ordinance for. When will those go into effect and are any of the surveyors willing to start doing that even before the ordinance is in effect?
Swartzendruber: The first hearing of the draft ordinance was last month at the P and Z so presumably next month we’ll get it to the Board. There’s a lag time after that. I got the message to assume that it’s going to be passed in one meeting. It’s going to be a few months. The other thing is that part of the problem is that the Cities are still not going to submit digitally for those areas. You’re talking about a lot of subdivisions, a lot of multi-lot subdivisions. We get a lot of one lot, smaller subdivisions and maybe four or five ten to fifteen-acre lot subdivisions. Those are few and far between. There’s still going to be a lot of work out there coming in and we won’t presumably get digital submittals for them. Now that may be a schedule for another day, maybe we need to sit down and work out some agreements with those cities to submit digitally too, but that is outside of what we are doing today.
Schultz: Are there any surveyors who would be willing to submit those before they are passed?
Kistler: Landmark has discussed that and has actually given us trial data and we have played with it a little bit. Part of the problem is that the format of the data may not necessarily be such that it is easy to pull out the data you want to be converted.
Havel: The one that I saw from Landmark was a preliminary plat. It was actually the wrong data more than an actual final version. We need a final plat.
Kistler: Right, so if the data they are providing isn’t adequate you end up wasting more time trying to pull out what you need from it.
Schultz: I wasn’t thinking that was a solution but I was thinking that could help.
Swartzendruber: I think that could help but that we also have to remember that back in CAD land we were still a year behind in that workflow too. We’re going from that environment to a seemingly more complex environment. And we’re not throwing as much resources at it. I wonder how are we going to get caught up and if we’re going to stay caught up once we are?
Kistler: Well, I think if we have one more staff member we can stay caught up. The big question is how are we going to get to that point the quickest?
Schultz: I have another question. Is there anything else like in CMS? I know the City Assessors the guys are updating the mailing names and addresses that traditionally the Auditor’s Office did. Is that right?
Kruse: We’re doing it for Iowa City I know.
Schultz: Right, for Iowa City and like the Treasurer was talking about being willing to do it for the County. I guess my question is if other departments are willing to do any of that CMS work that could relieve...
Kistler: That would help. We’ve got a stack of address changes like that from property tax statements that came in this time around. It’s one more...
Kruse: But the majority of the address updating is done during the transfer process anyway.
Kistler: Right, it’s the routine changes in between, there is another indication that we need a programming change because we can go in for an existing name and make routine change at that address for everybody. But if they change the name we can’t do a mass update. We’d have to do a fake transfer or something like that or have the Assessor do it and we do it. But there is a problem with how the software works and it makes it more difficult to do an address change. Like if you need to take one name off it won’t let you change that one line.
Schultz: My question is can we get enough definition that we can submit it to CMS even if we have to change it?
Kruse: That was partially discussed in one session and for some reason she thought it was an almost undoable thing to do. To edit the name versus create a whole new record for the address, which is what we wanted and it would make it simpler and quicker for one. It makes more sense in my mind, but they were very stand offish as far as taking it on as a potential change. I think it’s a programming thing. It’s an issue of if you change that record it’s kind of like changing the deed holder almost but it affects all the records that that particular address record is associated with. I don’t know why that is any different than changing the address. You can edit the address and it makes changes through everything but you can’t edit the names. In my mind there’s no difference in that. But they seem to hold that you can’t change the names but you can change the address all day long with no problems.
Schultz: You’re talking about in the Assessors section? That was like Chris who is the trainer.
Kruse: Yes, exactly.
Schultz: What I’m thinking is maybe we can try to push it through Jeanine in the actual programming area to see, even if they charge us to do that, maybe it would be cost effective for us to retain them.
Kistler: That would help.
Swartzendruber: Can I throw out something? Why don’t we entertain a notion of submitting some bids to get this brought up to date and also look at hiring an additional person. But I think frankly at that point if we get caught up and we’re still sliding backwards, something else drastic is going to have to be looked at. That may mean pulling that function completely out of the Auditor’s Office. I don’t know, but it concerns me that we get side tracked on these other tasks and we can’t dedicate people fully to it. I really wonder if we do get another person in there if that’s not going to happen. I don’t know if we can get a whole lot of assurance that that won’t happen. It seems like most of the folks that are in those positions, things change. I think we need to start looking at getting caught up and getting to the point that we are no longer two years behind.
Greazel: I’ll second that.
Swartzendruber: What kind of time frame would we be talking about to look at RFPs to get this done? That’s probably tough to even guess at this point.
Havel: I’ll have to look into it.
Harney: Would that be something they would have to come into your office to do or could that be out-sourced?
Kistler: There would be a time issue of getting the data to people, talking to them on the phone, they’re going to have questions, checking it when it comes back, which would be well worth it if it’s getting it done.
Kruse: But the backlog…
Kistler: You should be able to ship off the basic information to the people doing the work.
Kruse: Would that route leave enough? It seems like the piece that’s backing everything up is getting it inserted into the map itself. When I was doing it in AutoCAD that was always the backlog. That was the tough thing to do, get that thing in there. Is there some way we can actually get someone physically in there to help do that piece? If he only did that would that be enough?
Kistler: Then you’re looking for another full time position. That is the backlog. That’s where we need someone we can train and keep who knows how to do that higher level GIS work.
Kruse: So I guess what I’m getting at is we’ll be shipping off the data to be digitized and built isn’t really going to help as much...
Swartzendruber: They could come in house and do that too couldn’t they?
Kruse: I guess that’s what I’m asking.
Greazel: Yes, they can.
Kruse: Can they come in and actually insert it in the database for us?
Kistler: They would just create a version of the database and actually do the same thing John’s doing and then we would merge the data.
Havel: We could even get some part time assistance under my supervision to do that end of the product instead of going outside. There’s an option there. So it would be a full time, forty hours a week person sitting in IS doing nothing but plat development. If we want, we can get them at a cheaper rate because there are a lot of college kids around here who have recently graduated. Sam could do this work. He could build the surveys and build the plats and do all those steps. Like I said, that’s the easy end of it. It’s the final judgment that takes the time to get it fully in the system. That’s something that I propose in addition to checking out what companies can do. To me that is a cheaper solution, but you’re still going to get the same product if you do send it out, if you’re just centering initial plat development.
Greazel: What I would like to see if we are going to go forward with this, I would like to see a range of options. The important thing to me is time. Every day that I can’t use the data it makes me less efficient and causes problems in my office. There is a difference between hiring it out and paying a little bit more but getting it done a year earlier, that’s important to me. Time is a factor, so when we do the research could we check with the company regarding time it will take to get the data back so we can use it compared to doing it in house?
McKiness: Rick, I think it might be more helpful to speed things up if the person who is doing the final fitting of things together is up in your office instead of down in ours. It’s easy with the chaos there to mindlessly build the things than it is to, with all of the distractions coming in, on trying to figure out what have I done ten minutes ago and what do I need to do now to get this thing into place?
Schultz: Are there things that can be done to help reduce all of your distractions?
McKiness: Not down there. That’s impossible.
Greazel: Somebody needs to know that.
Schultz: Do you guys use that conference room down there? Maybe you could do it in the conference room where it would certainly be a lot quieter? If you had that table...
Kistler: That is a space where you could go when you need quiet space.
Havel: The atmosphere is a big concern. Cubicles, I think, are an option to help reduce the amount of viewable distractions, or other types of formats or walls of some kind. Maybe we add some walls in there, back in the back end of that. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in department organization, but it is pretty clear that John’s point is well made. It is very distracting in that environment and this work is very technical and very detailed. I don’t want to devalue the other clerks, their work is valuable too. But the idea is in order for John to function properly and whoever else is in this position, they do need quiet with minimal distractions. In the limited time that I am down there, I’ll go down and help John and I’ll sit there and I am amazed that he can do what he has done in that environment. That’s just some opinions at this point in time. To kind of paint a picture of what needs to be done, at this point in time, as of yesterday, the current unmatched parcels, meaning the parcels that are in real estate that are not matched in the GIS layer is running at 2,500. Currently in parcels Temp, that is the Temp layer that we have constructed to get parcels out visually to users through the Internet and through other applications is about 900, almost 1,000. Essentially more than a third of those parcels are constructed but they are not in the final parcel poly layer. Again, I think a lot of progress is going to occur to get the parcel temp layer more complete basically getting those parcels off the paper and into the system which will help. We have also recently modified our ArcINS website and GIS online to search both parcel temps and the parcel polygon layer. So, once the parcel poly temps are out there they are just as functional in terms of the online GIS as the regular parcel poly. Internally you can search on it by deed holder, address, and parcel number. Externally you can search by address and parcel number. Once you enter that search and it looks at both databases to take you to the proper parcel. To help get that information out is going to make a lot of progress. Obviously the key is to get it into the final parcel poly layer.
Greazel: Just to bring you up to date why it is crucial to us so people understand, the most activity we have on a parcel is when it is new. You have realtors, insurance people, contractors, potential buyers, and developers. They all want this information and once the house is built and the people move in, it slows down. We may not have anyone access that parcel for a long time. The crucial thing for us, to maximize our efficiency is exactly when we don’t have the information, when it’s a new parcel and we need it current. That’s where our emphasis is. When I was at the GIS meeting talking to Linn County people they said between the time this is approved and when they get it in is something like two weeks at the max. In ten days in most cases you can go online and access it.
Kistler: How many people do they have working on it though?
Greazel: How many people?
Kistler: Yes.
Havel: Four. There are four staff, Jason and then three people.
Greazel: It would be a big help if instead of calling my office and asking for this information they could just go online, bring it up, and get the information off of GIS. It would be a huge saving to us. But six months later doesn’t do us any good because the high activity level on that parcel is over with.
Havel: That’s a good way, as far a prioritization, to come up with which parcels in the newer subdivision…
Schultz: I have another question. I know that you are using the figures with the matching, are all of the new parcels into real estate or is there a delay in splits in the subdivisions getting into real estate.
Kistler: We do them at their sales basically and that pretty much...
Kruse: There a little bit of a backlog, especially after coming out of the tax rollup time frame. Now we’re starting to get caught up. Typically there are a couple of subdivisions in waiting and maybe a couple of condos, and not very many. Right now there’s kind of a backlog because of tax, we’ve shut down and all the splits but now we’re starting to get caught up on all of those. Generally they are pretty quick. Within a couple of months of receiving a condo declaration and or a plat we generally get that on the system. There are some that are problematic though that kind of hang out there and everybody thinks why hasn’t this been done but it’s because the problem hasn’t been addressed. Some of them have been sitting since I was down in the Auditor’s Office so it’s been three or four years.
Swartzendruber: Is there any money in the GIS budget now to get an intern starting ASAP? I think we need to act on it and get something going. I would suggest we should do that, at least as an initial measure then start looking at contracting and hiring an additional FTE. As far as the Linn County situation is concerned, they’ve got four people, we’ve got four people supposedly too, yet they manage to keep up better.
Kistler: They have four people in GIS, that’s not their plat people... If you took a look at their entire real estate staff it’s twice as many.
Swartzendruber: That’s what I’m saying, they’re dedicating those people to that activity and we’re not. We need to get to that point. Until we do, I guess I don’t necessarily see that we will be to the point where we can maintain that.
Greazel: In fairness when I talked to (inaudible) he said they are pulled off at times and do other things so they aren’t strictly dedicated.
Swartzendruber: And I don’t know if they had as much development per se either, but still.
Greazel: I’d love have them within two weeks believe me, that would make life simpler.
Harney: Is there funds in GIS to outsource? I’m not sure where we’ll get the money.
Stutsman: That thought occurred to me too.
Greazel: I have $50,000 budgeted for GIS this year that we don’t really have allocated yet for a specific thing. That’s what I was pushing, that somehow we could allocate it because it is in my budget for GIS. We might have some possibility there to do something with it.
Schultz: I think you were projecting that we probably have about $23,000 in carry over. I know that you were probably planning to use that toward other things in the future, but maybe getting caught up is a higher priority. Maybe we could delay some of the future things and use that $23,000 that is the estimated carry over from this current fiscal year’s budget.
Greazel: 75.
Havel: I will start looking at companies to see what options are there and put together a formal RFP, or at least an initial RFP to get some ideas as far as cost. I know I talked to Sidwell Company about a year ago and they said that they would charge about $20 a subdivision to draw it, just draw it. I don’t know if that included annotation or anything else above that, but I will start working on that and getting that going. I do think a part timer in the interim because getting companies kind of put together and all of the contract work, it may be a month maybe a couple of weeks or something like that.
Kistler: It probably makes sense to farm out the bigger subdivisions that are pending and then if you could get somebody started right away on some of our farmstead splits that also helps with Bill’s priority right now and some of the areas that need to get wrapped up.
Swartzendruber: We can draw them all in so they should just need to be adjusted, so that shouldn’t really be a big problem.
Harney: Is there an issue when you outsource something like that so that it meets your particular standards or criteria? I would think that would have to be set out.
Havel: That’s where doing it in house you can keep a tighter eye on that. You can still do that with contracting it out, you just need to make sure that they supply you with what you want. That’s just going to take some time to organize in terms of swapping out some data. I think coming up with an option like Bill said, I know we’ll do that. We’ve talked about this before in previous meetings and it just hasn’t developed but I think obviously the ball is rolling pretty heavy now and progress is going to be made. I think this report tracks it daily except for weekends. This report will be a good gauge as far as if progress is being made. We want quality I’ll say again, but we also want a solid credible database that is accurate. Just making these numbers match is not the complete goal, it’s making them match with confidence. Just to throw this out again, 95.37% is the current match rate. Just to give you an idea of how off we are from where we need to be. I will work with Mark...
Harney: What does that mean, that 95.37%?
Havel: Obviously we want a 100% match, that’s our goal. 95% is what we have matching between the maps and real estate.
Stutsman: So what you are saying is that even those that are a match are not accurate? That’s not taking into account all those that haven’t even been matched yet? What I’m saying is that you aren’t even accurate with those you’ve already done.
Havel: No, of what we have done, there may be some problems here and there, maybe some polygons that do not have proper attribution, little mistakes here and there. What that says is that of the records that are in real estate, 95% of those have a match inside of the GIS site. OK? So we’re uneven. That’s the ratio of where we’re at in terms of completeness, but we want to be at 100%
Schultz: I think you said that the 5% amounts to about 2,500 you said?
Havel: Yes, about 2,500.
Kistler: Not all of those are new splits too, because we had a large number of tax-exempt parcels that weren’t on the system but we do have polygons in the GIS form. That’s something that Sal started working on, and it was such a huge task that we decided to put that on hold and only do it on an as needed basis. Then they would do those as they work on an area where they’re doing new splits they would bring those tax-exempt parcels in too. Basically a lot of those are fairly simple fixes and just a matter of creating the database record because we’ve already got the polygon. That’s probably a minor part of it compared to the splits as far as what needs to be done there.
McKiness: There’s also a certain percentage of where we have it in real estate and it is matching up to a parcel in GIS that’s not right. We find those every once in a while too. We’ve had people call in and say this isn’t my property but it has my name on it. We try to fix it at that point, or as I’m going through I’m finding places where one parcel because of a lack of a line swallowed another. So, there’s two parcel numbers that are wrong: the one that is not matching and the one that is twice the size or whatever. So, there’s some of that too.
Kistler: Some of that was part of the conversion. The people who did the conversion did a very good job of deciphering the information they had. But, on our mapping we had within a section you would have block numbers that would indicate everything in a block and then individual three digit numbers. So, they would have to figure out this three digit number goes with this block number. They did an excellent job but on occasion they would misinterpret them and attach this single number to this block over here by mistake. That is the kind of thing we run into but it’s pretty...
Havel: We’re getting there.
Harney: So even though we have somebody go through and do these, you are still going to have to check these and make sure everything is accurate?
Kistler: Yes.
Harney: At least the information is there.
Havel: It’s a work in progress. We do internal QA/QC, it’s part of the process. It’s part of the checklist, to have somebody else check your work.
Kistler: That’s something we teach part time temporary people to do. They don’t have to be able to create the final data, they just need to look at a picture and interpret it and say, this is the right number for that parcel and the QA/QC doesn’t have to be someone with the best GIS skills.
Swartzendruber: Do we need to vote on this?
Havel: I don’t know, what are we voting on?
Swartzendruber: That you look into RFPs to get this done and also hire an intern position and look at an FTE for the Auditor’s Office.
Kistler: Do we have a second? Do you second that?
Greazel: Yeah, it’s still good, my second is still good.
Swartzendruber: Got to vote. All in favor?
Group: Aye
Swartzendruber: Opposed?
Schultz: Structurally I am just trying to think of the logistics of it. This is the Technical Advisory Committee. Do we have to do the same thing with the Policy Committee?
Swartzendruber: Well, I wonder if they even go before the Board to present the interim position and the stopgap?
Havel: Yes, it will go to the Policy.
Schultz: Because the Policy Committee is technically for policy and budget issues as well as priorities and that kind of thing. I hate to do lots of meetings, but...
Havel: I agree. We’ll take it to the Policy Committee and hopefully the discussion won’t be as long because we’ve discussed this and hammered it out. I think this is kind of what this group does, is get out the details and then present it to the Policy Committee in a more logical format so that we’re not having extremely long discussions at higher levels. Yes, we’ll do it.
Swartzendruber: As far as the issue with the working environment, is there still a Space Needs Committee or anything like that, that would be an appropriate place to discuss that?
Stutsman: They’re meeting sometime.
Harney: It’s next week at 1:00.
Stutsman: Yes, the 27th at 1:00. Do you want that put on to discuss?
Swartzendruber: Well, I think it’s a good idea. It’s something that has come up before and it would be nice to address it.
FISCAL YEAR 06 BUDGET DISCUSSION
Havel: OK, move on to the next item. I think we’ll go down to the budget requests. Essentially there are two big items and some standard items on here as far as software that are reoccurring in our maintenance. Thanks Mark.
Kistler: Thank you.
Havel: Number one, the $42,000 covers our annual software maintenance expenses plus additional purchases as needed as far as Item B is, so I just rounded it up to $42,000. Those are standard just to keep our copies and versions current. Hardware we’ve kind of over the years included a hardware expense in case we have to assist in purchasing a new plotter or assist in a server upgrade along with Information Services so most of that is money that has historically been involved in our budget so it’s nothing new. It’s just something to have there in case we need additional hardware. In this case which we’ll get into later is the GIS specialist position. We’ll probably purchase that out of that budget. The computers and stuff, or is that...
Schultz: The computers for it would come out of the GIS.
Havel: Yes, so potential new personnel, the hardware, the phone systems, computer systems.
Schultz: GPS.
Havel: The GPS equipment. The big ticket is number three, which is database development at $100,000. In FY 05 we allocated $50,000 towards the public land survey enhancement. That gets back to what we were talking about before in terms of upgrading our database to be more accurate in terms of where the section corners are and where the public land survey lines are in our database. Currently I am working with Secondary Roads pretty heavily on this. Will that money actually be needed? I can’t say that for sure right now, but in talking with some contractors and talking with Secondary Roads it could be definitely used and needed in terms of contracting some of that GPS based work out and getting those section corners collected inside of our system and updating. One opportunity that we have with Secondary Roads is that they have high level survey grade GPS equipment that will give us the output that we need. So there is some cooperative effort going on to get that. It benefits them in the long run as much as it benefits us in terms of their projects. They actually go out and collect section corners as they do work. In addition to this is creating an online database to show these section corners and the corner certificates in addition to the Recorders Office, having it link out. So that when someone wants to see a corner certificate they don’t have to come down to the office, they can see it online and do it geographically through our system. That is going to take some time in order to get that data in the format and in the process that we need to make that functionality possible. There is money for that allocated out of this money. I’ve talked with several surveyors and they said it is a long-term process to come up with a countywide control system that has section corners. We don’t necessarily need the complete county, but obviously the developing areas. That in turn helps the parcel database development because it gives us more accurate base data to work from. I think a lot of these judgment calls that we run into can be reduced by developing that control network. I’ve heard that from other counties as well, so we’re not alone in doing this. Several other counties are working toward that as well. The other part is the 2006 Orthophotography which would be flown in FY 06 and eventually the final project would end up in FY 07 much like it did this time where the project spanned a couple years. So, initially just to get the photography collected and the initial processing I suggest allocating $50,000 towards that and hopefully the Assessors can help in addition to that or at least match it to contribute towards that as well. I have received verbal commitments from Iowa City and Coralville to help out on that project. They both have money they are going to allocate towards getting data for their areas collected. Partnering with them will save a lot of money because that will share the costs of the flying and other processes. How that is going to completely develop is unclear, we have time to plan that out. Looking ahead that is a big-ticket item. The orthos that we have recently received have been very helpful to us internally plus the public has loved them. They use it all of the time on the internet on our website. It is a valuable product because it builds a historical record over time of the county and how it is developing. There are multiple uses out there by other agencies and getting more partners involved is a good thing and something we will look into. Hopefully our costs will continue to go down. I don’t see the costs being near as much as what we had this time around because we shouldered a lot of the burden ourselves. That is where that goes. Other reoccurring events on item 4 that’s just allocating money to get training activities. Whether we hire some consultants to come in and do some training, or if we need additional software training we can do that as well, and conferences and travel expenses for my training and conference attendance. Number 5 is not necessarily included in the technology side of GIS but is the personnel side, which obviously needs to be approved and allocated, but is the personnel for a GIS specialist position. Obviously as we continue to grow as a County a lot of my tasks have been more technical than administrative and I feel that for the County to get the full benefit of a Coordinator position is to free up more of my time to do planning of projects, promotional activities, PR events, and getting that type of activity moving ahead. So the specialist would be somebody to help take over more of the technical jobs, part of my jobs, plus serve as a backup for me in case I move on or whatever. So then the County can continue to function as if I were here. I know that would be a hard thing to do. Anyway, Jean and I have talked about this and the big thing is a backup. If I get sick or am not around somebody can keep things moving ahead and QA/QC things or make the operations continue because there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes with this data and these processes that at this point in time only I know about in detail. Documenting and getting somebody trained I think it would be very beneficial. But this person can also do a lot of other tasks as well. The way we built the position, is to be a multi service person to help out with other projects and database development projects and GPS activities, going out in the field with personnel and departments to help continue their use of that equipment or just try it out. I open all of this up for discussion or concerns.
Schultz: The GIS specialist is a position that this Committee did approve and this Committee did put in a request for it last year. So, this isn’t the first time we’ve asked for this, we are just asking for this again from last year.
Greazel: Where is your salary?
Havel: Where is my salary?
Schultz: It comes out of IS. All the personnel type things are in the IS side of it so this would go in the IS budget. It’s not technically in the technology budget but (inaudible). The back up is really important because no one knows the level of how things are setup and we would have a major problem if Rick was sick long term or left. And this could help. This person could even, theoretically, in essence be able to help the Auditor’s Office be able to get caught up. And, once they are caught up, if they start to get behind this person could help with those kinds of things.
Greazel: IS is all about back up.
Havel: This is an increase over last year’s request. We’ve been using 124 as a request item so we’ve increased the initial ...
Greazel: So you’ve made a motion to go forward with this to the Board.
Havel: Yes. The Policy Committee. Just basically and approval of this.
Greazel: I’ll make a motion.
Swartzendruber: Second? I’ll second. All those in favor?
Group: Aye.
Schultz: Anyone opposed?
Havel: We’ll move it forward.
Swartzendruber: One little note. I guess I’d like to see I don’t know when you’re planning to hold the Policy Committee meeting but I’d like to see if we could get on the Board agenda to approve the intern position so we can get that going instead of waiting a couple of months.
Havel: Sure. I want to get this going pretty fast.
Swartzendruber: If there is some one available I don’t see why we shouldn’t just proceed on that as quickly as possible.
Havel: So maybe two weeks after the general? I’ll set a date and get the Policy Committee meeting set.
Schultz: Would we want this to be a temporary position? Or a student long term part time position?
Swartzendruber: That may be a Lora question, I don’t know.
Havel: I think if we could keep somebody long term, more than four months. That would be the way I would suggest it. I guess we could research our opportunities. Yes because then I’m not retraining somebody after four months and we can keep somebody. That’s a good point. We can talk about the options. I guess the point is at longer than four months and we have to pay benefits.
Harney: It becomes a permanent part time at that point I think.
Havel: We’ll just have to check the numbers and see. Do some crunching. Are there any other concerns on that?
Havel: I’m not going to go over this in detail. The last section, it’s a working plan, something that I’ve put in place. I’ve talked to Jean about it in terms of if it is workable or not. But, this is something that I will keep updated and actually I use this as a way to track projects and current activities and proposed activities. It is something that we will probably end up putting up on the Web eventually as a PR thing to show what goes on. It tracks different activities or areas; software, hardware, database, development. Obviously it doesn’t give you the full-blown detail of each plan, but it gives you an outline as far as what is going on with each category. I kind of wanted to use it as a list to show you what things are going on, what things are proposed, and where I’m doing and spending some of my time. To give you hints, there are some reoccurring events a lot of the bold, larger font items under each item are reoccurring events but there are certain projects that occur under those umbrellas. For instance, under C1, that is produce and maintain countywide databases. That is a general topic but there are several different databases that you can see that fall underneath that category. Down below that we have proposed databases. Work hasn’t actually begun on but people have expressed a need for them. So this helps me track those types of activities and eventually those can possibly be moved up to C1 eventually. So, I just wanted to provide this to you as a thing to show you what things are going on, what activities are going on in my world in terms of workshops I have attended or workshops that are coming up or conferences, budget planning, proposed public relation activities. Something in particular that is under G1 on page four is that I would like to work on putting together a GIS open house event next spring. I don’t know if that will occur or not. That is something I like to start working on so that we can have public displays of maps or applications, have certain departments discuss what they are doing with the public, you know just as a PR event.
Greazel: My suggestion is that wait until we get caught up so that people aren’t discouraged because they can’t see their new house in their subdivision. It will work best if we’re caught up.
Havel: Good point. It just tracks meetings and committees that I am involved in that are pertinent to GIS and administrative responsibilities. One thing I’ll just throw out is under G4 under the map showcase. I think it would be pretty nice to start putting some maps out of different things in the hallways, eventually in cases, that either showcase certain maps that have been produced or especially the orthophotography. Just so people can see some of this information as they are coming through the halls that they may not otherwise know about. I kind of want to showcase for instance, the County Assessors; you guys are doing sales ratio mapping and stuff like that. Stuff that would be of interest I think, and it is easily done. It is something that doesn’t take a lot of effort just time and planning and producing the maps.
County Recorder Kim Painter: Rick would this be too big and maybe Sally would know too for the Communications Committee for the cases we have downstairs to showcase for a while for a few months at a time? That has tended to be a rotating spot, not big enough to meet your long-term needs, but it might be nice to get something out there to show people.
Havel: Yes, we had a display last year in...
Schultz: November.
Havel: …November we will put. And I’m thinking there’s some showcase items such as orthophotography where we can have different areas of the county blown up to show the detail. It catches people’s eyes to see that photography. There are other maps coming. The DNR just finished a geologic map of the county. They resurveyed the county and that will be available soon on our system. They produced the data and we just need to get it from them. It’s a pretty map because it has a lot of different colors because it is showing a lot of different geologic formations throughout the county. Stuff like that I think is eye catching and promotes GIS and shows the County as doing something proactively.
Greazel: I just want to compliment that I just purchased some software that bridges my appraisal software with GIS so that I can bring the two together so that when I do work in my what we call camera computers that’s appraisal software. So now with the appraisal software I can integrate GIS into so I can graphically see different sales ratios and different problems in sales that are too low, some are just right, those that are too high, different types of characteristics so that I can take the information in the camera software and graphically see it. Rick and IS have been very helpful with me to merge the two together because when one is over here and the other is over there it is hard to look at two things at the same time, but when you merge them together and the information over here is feeding the data in the GIS it is extremely helpful for us to be more efficient in our job and also to be more accurate in our appraisals. Our goal is to have as few people as possible walk up to the counter when we send out those assessment notices. By utilizing the graphical display of the information in the appraisal software it is going to be very helpful to us. So, that is just another application that is important to us to have all of the data brought together. Thanks for helping us do that, Rick.
Havel: Yes, it’s a really nice product too, that parcel analyst it is going to show you a lot of cool maps. It helps produce those but it also helps analyze the data graphically which helps out. I think Todd has experienced that, with recently being able to pull out data from his system as well and link up to the maps.
Stutsman: I was wondering if there is any way that… We all know what is going on in accounting but the public doesn’t or doesn’t know how to access this stuff, if it could be video taped and shown on public television. You know, I remember watching one time when the City put in that new ramp downtown when you had to pay ahead of time, they did a very informative video. It was basically for seniors, but I thought it just took the mystique away and it could be the same with this. You know people hear about GIS but I think a lot of people don’t connect the dots and actually know how to access it. If we could just do even a five or ten minute thing about this is how you go to your computer and this is how you do it. You know, I think it would be really educational and helpful. They are always looking for stuff like that on public access.
Havel: Yes.
Schultz: Good idea.
Havel: I’ll write that on the list. I’ll need volunteers to do it.
McKiness: I’ve got a backlog of work to do.
Havel: It would be a good idea to have Supervisors out there demonstrating it. This is something I would like to get out, if you see something or if you have something that is not on here we can put it on here. Once again, it is an ongoing tracking device for what has been proposed and what are current projects that were funded or big projects, such as the aerial photography, the public land survey or the parcel database, and get ideas or at least know that it has been addressed and it is on the block.
Schultz: I think we all thought that we kind of want to include some things that are in departments and I think that Rick was talking to Pat about all the different things that you’re planning to do or are doing. That would be good to get combined into this document. We could put in what you are doing in GIS too to have a full GIS report.
Havel: Sure. Were you going to say something Todd? We have stuff under D1 from the ambulance. They are putting in some AVL equipment that utilizes GIS based data to track ambulance locations and to track times and mileage. That is coming up and to me that is a showcase item, data that you have been working on; ag assessment, parcel analyst stuff. SEATS uses AVL GIS based data. The Sheriff’s are obviously looking toward computer aided mapping for their dispatching so the list is growing. The need is there so we want to convey that so if anybody gets asked you can have access to the plan summary so you can say what is going on.
Greazel: When taxes went out to be able to when the taxpayer calls and says you know that piece of land I’ve got? It runs on (inaudible) why do you have it (inaudible)? I can see right on my computer, I can bring up that aerial photograph and I can see exactly how the creek is going through his property or how much is forest reserve and how much isn’t. It saves me a huge amount between having to drive out there and physically inspect it just to be able to look at that photograph, zoom in on it and say yes, no problem, we’ll change it.
Havel: Cool
McKiness: In order to help even further with that, what about tying in the quadrangle maps with elevation as another layer so we could bring that up to look at. I know I can do it on the State’s website out of Iowa State but we don’t have anything like that here that would show...
Havel: We do have an elevation model. We’ve worked with the University and one value I think that they are going to provide to us is map production and database analysis and production. We’ve provided them with our information, the orthos, and some of the digital elevation model that was used in creation of the orthos. It gives us a surface of Johnson County, in addition to our other (inaudible) and parcel data so that they can start using their resources because they use the same software we use. Their classes always have needs for projects and activities related to GIS so I think over time we are going to see some benefit by working with them to get certain maps produced, certain databases developed and analysis performed, getting that data worked with. I think that helps the QA/QC process because I think they’ll see problems and relate that back to us but they’ve been overwhelmingly happy with what they have received and I think long term their Planning Department plus their Geography Department are really going to benefit from using our data and I think we’re going to benefit from them using our data and working with it. Hopefully like I said, some showcase items can be developed, land use studies, contour maps developed from that data, and certain stuff that we don’t have time to do and those students love to do and need to do that to get some real world experience. That is something that just recently happened, we entered into a license-sharing agreement basically or they signed the agreement and are utilizing our information. I think a lot of things positive are developing. We always hear the parcel thing and that is a big thing, but I think there is a lot of other things that are working in favor to help keep this thing moving ahead and making the citizens of Johnson County happy.
McKiness: I think that the project you are working on with Sal right now of when a voter calls and wants to know where his precinct is at, bringing up a system where you can see his parcel, you can see where he is going to vote, and maybe even the route highlighted is something that they could bring up and this is something visual that can help them from GIS.
Havel: Sal has been building a database of the polling sites for the County. We already have the precinct maps or boundaries out there on the GIS system so you can pull up a map of the precincts. What this will do is show the specific polling places within those precincts. Apparently they were mandated to have maps at every polling site of the precinct.
McKiness: Right, it’s part of the new laws on voting that there has to be a map at the precinct that they can look at and point to this is where my house is at.
Havel: It is something that is pretty easy to do, it just takes time to do it. I think we have 57 polling sites, I think we have them all mapped now, or close to...
Map Delineator Jose Flores: I think we have 47 maps done.
Havel: I think we’ll be able to accommodate that and get those maps produced.
Greazel: Do we have to have cameras there too?
Havel: Every polling site?
McKiness: There’s so many laws that came in in this last couple of months that that’s part of what is going on.
Havel: Alright, well, thanks Bill
Greazel: Thank you.
Havel: Appreciate your time, if you ever have any questions, feel free.
McKiness: Do we want to turn that thing off or...
Kruse: That’s fine, so we don’t get any of these extraneous conversations on there. You can turn it off there, it may already be off.
Flores: Do you need it for the minutes?
Havel: We don’t have go to that detail.
Flores: They do that down there.
Havel: I’m sure they do but we’re not transcribing these.
Flores: Oh, we’re not, OK.
Adjourned at 10:44 a.m.