Applying the Power of an Enterprise Model

Ottawa County, Michigan, Sets Fair Fees for Online GIS Products

In the face of unprecedented growth, Ottawa County, Michigan, sought to computerize its tax parcel maps and other public data so that county personnel could access the information more easily and fulfill requests from citizens and other government units more efficiently.

In 1998, Ottawa County selected 3Di, a geospatial solutions company in Easton, Maryland, and an Esri Business Partner, to propose a viable solution. The company recommended implementation of an enterprise GIS to organize data and make it more readily accessible to the staff. Moreover, the company suggested putting the GIS online using ArcIMS so that anyone could view and print maps via the Internet.

The County immediately embraced the idea of an online GIS, but this technology raised another important issue. Only a couple years before, Michigan had passed an Enhanced Access Law allowing local governments to charge fees for public data accessed through an advanced means such as the Internet. The law specified these fees should be based on actual project cost recovery.

In response to the Michigan law and other legislation requiring local governments to account for GIS project costs, 3Di was in the position to provide a GIS cost and fee structure model specifically for its GIS development projects.

The model tracks actual and projected expenses relating to staffing, consulting, data development, fixed hardware and software, and Internet-enabling technology. The model then tallies these figures and apportions them by percentage to the different products offered. To compute individual product prices-such as printouts of tax and parcel maps, orthophotographs and related assessor's data, and parcel information-these results are divided by estimates of online GIS and traditional hard-copy product sales.

"We have always charged for these products, but now our prices are based on cost accounting principles with the idea of recouping real expenses, which is one of the goals of the Enhanced Access Law," said Brian Berdanier, Ottawa County GIS director.

"Our goal is not to make a profit on the GIS, but we would like to break even, at least on operating costs," Berdanier said. "The model has projected that in the first year we will recover $60,000 and up to $300,000 in subsequent years when all phases are operational."

The $3.2 million Ottawa County GIS will roll out over five years in three phases, each carefully designed to build upon the data layers and applications deployed in the preceding phase. The first phase (90 percent complete by April 2001) comprises the most important applications and data sets. These core applications provide online access to the tax parcel maps that are in constant demand.

"We chose 3Di because they could provide us with a broad range of services that would offer a complete solution," said Berdanier.

"We built the system around Esri products because they offer the high level of customization required for the core applications," said 3Di's Lou Garcia.

ArcInfo was used to create the base GIS functionality and to clean up data sets and organize them into layers. These GIS layers and related attributes are stored in the Microsoft SQL Server database, which is managed and queried by ArcSDE.

At the heart of the system is ArcIMS. All of the core online applications are being written in Visual Basic within this software. It provides the link between the online users and the GIS database, offering them the ability to utilize selected query, map building, and printing functions.

For more information, contact Lou Garcia, 3Di, 28969 Information Lane, Easton, Maryland 21601 (tel.: 410-770-6000, Web: www.3dillc.com), or Brian R. Berdanier, GIS director, Ottawa County (tel.: 616-738-4881, Web: www.co.ottawa.mi.us).

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