22 December 2011

Douglas County, NV took on the role of providing centralized GIS services to three of its neighboring Nevada jurisdictions. Carson City, Storey County, and Lyon County have agreed through Memorandums of Understandings (MOU) to establish the Douglas County GIS Division as their de facto GIS office. This arrangement offers immediate economies of scale for all involved, and avoids duplication of services at a time when public budgets are shrinking on a yearly basis.

Clearly GIS lends itself to a regional approach. However, such an arrangement is not without its inherent challenges. Each of the four participants has their own priorities for GIS. To add further complexity, each jurisdiction already had at least some level of GIS implementation prior to the MOUs, and those implementations were at vastly different levels of sophistication.

The initial challenge was to solidify each jurisdiction’s catalog of data and to centralize access to that data using the SDE geodatabase architecture. Only one of the jurisdictions had a fully implemented SDE architecture, but it was not the most current release. And yet, in spite of this and other challenges that have presented themselves, the data has been falling into place smoothly.

The next challenge is to provide access to GIS data and spatial tools to each participating jurisdiction. For some, this only represents minor upgrades to their existing tool-set. For others, however, this will offer a  full-scale paradigm shift in the way they do business.  In some cases, staff has never had hands-on access to GIS data at any level. For many, access to spatial data has been limited to ad hoc map requests. The new vision is to put the data and tools into the right-hands to better facilitate access in real time instead of waiting for the map-request cycle.

The first few months of this new arrangement have reportedly gone very well, and the future of GIS in Douglas, Lyon and Storey County’s and Carson City is solid. As one of the first of its kind, this example of regionalized public GIS services is certainly an important case- study.

For more information, contact Eric Schmidt, GISP, GIS Supervisor, Douglas Co, NV, 775-782-9894 or eschmidt@co.douglas.nv.us or visit http://www.douglascountynv.gov/sites/main/CommProfile.cfm.