Who's My Legislator? What's My District?

The Nevada Legislature uses ArcIMS to provide an interactive display of current district and legislator information via its Web site. Nevada residents can search for their legislators either by entering their address or clicking on a map to navigate to their street.

To give the public better access to its legislators, the Legislative Counsel Bureau added a link from its home page to the ArcIMS application where users can retrieve a list of their state senators, assemblypersons, U.S. senators, and congressional representatives.

The easy-to-use application enables users to either enter an address or navigate the map. If a user enters an address, ArcIMS geocodes the entry and returns a map zoomed into the location and a list of representatives. If a user chooses to access the map, he/she can use the zoom tools to navigate to a street address then use the Identify tool to click on the street. After identifying which districts are located at a certain point, the application returns the list of representatives for those districts. Users can click on names in the list to view an individual legislator's biography and information page.

In the past, the research library handled similar requests by taking users' addresses and looking them up on a road map that also showed the legislative boundaries. Since the Web site has been online, calls to the research library have been reduced considerably.

The site receives an average of 150 to 200 hits per day, with significantly more just before elections and during Nevada's biennial, 120-day legislative sessions.