Kirkland's Utility Map Books

The City of Kirkland, Washington, recently completed the first phase of an ambitious five-year GIS project that included major initiatives in organization, data development, and application integration. Kirkland’s GIS staff is currently shifting the program’s focus to enhance data quality and accessibility as well as to promote value-added geographic analysis and displays. Utility infrastructure mapping was one of the top priorities during the first phase. This project identified municipal business functions that would benefit greatly from a GIS inventory of utility infrastructure data. These include routing of field staff, tracking customer information, identifying high-priority maintenance areas, facility inventory, data quality, network tracing, capital project planning, emergency preparedness, and regulatory compliance. The project began with the surface water drainage (“storm”) utility, followed by the sanitary sewer system, and finally the water utility.

Benefits of the project included improved data quality, greatly improved data transfer to other business systems, data distribution to outside requestors, and a set of highly successful utility atlases. This positive project outcome serves as a strong foundation for current municipal initiatives such as mobile technology enhancements, GIS-business application integration, and regional government cooperation.

Courtesy of the City of Kirkland, Washington.