City of New Berlin Assessor's Map

In 2001, the New Berlin assessor asked the Land Information Services Division to create new assessor's maps. These maps are used as a base map for the assessment of property. The maps that they were using were old and worn. Essentially, the original base map had not changed since 1971. For the past 30 years, lot splits, combinations, and subdivisions were drawn in pencil or plats were copied and taped onto the map.

Land Information Services created new assessor's maps using ArcView 3.2. These maps consist of three views, the quarter section window, address grid, and index map. The quarter section window contains 72 themes such as parcel lines, road rights-of-way, extended lot lines, subdivision boundaries, building footprints, schools, easements, and associated annotation. The city assessor found the new colored maps much easier to use. In addition, Land Information Services can easily print out a new sheet whenever a major change takes place.

To prevent having to create 147 different layouts (one for each quarter section in the city), Land Information Services wrote an Avenue script that would automatically adjust the view extent and relevant layout text and highlight the appropriate area on the index map.