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August 23, 2008

Jacksonville Geographic Info Systems hits the net

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

Jacksonville is now an open map. With the city’s Geographic Information Systems program having recently been made available to the public, the people of Jacksonville now have a staggering amount of information at their fingertips.

With the click of a mouse pad, citizens can now find out how any piece of property in town is zoned, locate any sewer or water line in their area, check what day their trash gets picked up and determine what City Council district they live in — among many, many other applications.

GIS Coordinator Kenneth Doman and other members of the public works staff have spent countless hours during the past year inputting information about the city’s infrastructure into GIS. Much of that data can now be accessed by the community at http://maps.jacksonvilletx.org.

“By consolidating all this information and making it available to the public, we are potentially saving people a lot of time and effort. Before this went public, a citizen would have to go to several different city departments and the county appraisal district to gather all the information on these maps,” Doman said. “Some of the features included on the public GIS map are the city limits, the extraterritorial jurisdiction, the trash days, schools, lakes, zoning information, City Council districts, street lights, water and sewer lines, fire hydrants and property information.”

As his work continues, Doman said the public GIS will be continuously updated. He is currently working to find and inventory all of the city’s 6,400 water meters.

“We are also working, right now, on GPSing (Global Positioning System) our parks and cemeteries. Once we get all that information on there, people will even be able to search the cemetery lots and find where their loved ones are buried,” he said.

One feature currently available to the public that Doman would like to see improved is the aerial photography that the public GIS uses.

“People will be able to zoom in on a specific spot and see an aerial view of that area. We got our aerial pictures from the Texas Natural Resources Information Services, but we are looking into having our own aerial photography done,” Doman said. “It would let us get much better resolution on our pictures. Right now it’s two meters per pixel, and most towns try to get it down to about one foot per pixel or lower.”

Doman did warn that some computers may need to update their Internet browsers in order to get the on-line maps to work.

The new public maps will also allow citizens to search them by street name, property owner and subdivision. By clicking on a piece of property, a person can pull up the name of the owner, the lot’s identification number, the acreage of the land and more. While there are still a few small areas which have not yet been updated, Doman said the system has property information on “just about all of Jacksonville.”

According to Doman, by going public with this information, Jacksonville is taking a step ahead of the curve, technologically speaking.

“For towns our size, we are kind of setting a trend with this. There are other cities, like Henderson and Palestine, which have also begun developing their own GIS programs, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a town our size going on-line with their GIS. It’s pretty exciting,” he said.

The new maps can also be reached via the city’s Web site, http://jacksonville-texas.com, by visiting the GIS department’s Web page and clicking on the interactive map.

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