Priority Places application for the City of Asheville, North Carolina. Web based and easy to use. Further, it would allow individual businesses to select and assign weights to decision factors that they consider important rather than simply adapt their projects to preselected sites. Most importantly, it would generate customized priority maps based on the criteria selected, highlighting those locations that best meet the business owners’ requirements. The city selected Esri Business Partner Avencia Incorporated of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to build the application, leveraging the company’s DecisionTree software product, a set of Web-based high-performance geographic planning and prioritization tools that make complex site optimization calculations in less than one second. Leaders in the Office of Economic Development selected the business siting factors that they wanted in the application, including proximity to interstate exits, regional airports, existing utility infrastructure, and state incentive areas. Priority Places was officially launched in 2008 and provides an interactive user interface that displays each decision factor as a slider bar. The city recently updated the application with the ArcGIS API for Flex, which incorporates a new user interface with the rich, interactive features. On the site, users choose the importance of each decision factor by moving the appropriate slider bar from the neutral position (0) to a preference value ranging from -5 (avoid proximity) to 5 (prefer proximity). Decision factors can be selected and valued in any combination to provide truly customized site selections. The system then returns a heat map highlighting the areas that best match the specified criteria, and users can zoom in to view additional layers of data that can further enhance their decision-making powers. These layers include railways, flood hazard areas, zoning districts, and city-owned surplus and sale-pending properties. Additional features include geocoding, customized map color palettes, transparency controls, and the ability to create bookmarks of specific map views that can be quickly returned to at a later date. Priority Places has also been integrated with Esri’s Business Analyst Online API, enabling users to produce an array of reports on demographic and economic characteristics, retail expenditures, and housing for areas surrounding each selected location. For businesses looking to establish themselves in Asheville, Priority Places provides access to information and analysis that might otherwise be out of reach. For more information about Priority Places, contact Jason Mann, GIS and Application Services manager, City of Asheville (e-mail: JMann@ ashevillenc.gov). For more information about DecisionTree, contact Tamara Manik-Perlman, DecisionTree project manager, Avencia (e-mail: tmanik-perlman@avencia.com). Boulder County, Colorado—Keeping Property Assessments on the Up-and-Up County assessors strive to deliver independent, fair evaluations of property values. But in 2007, as the housing market began to crash and foreclosures rose, accomplishing that mission grew more difficult. Foreclosures can depress property values and potentially skew valuations. As Boulder County, Colorado, quickly discovered, foreclosures can also artificially inflate property assessments when they are a result of mortgage fraud. The Boulder County Assessor’s Office has become well acquainted with the tactics of mortgage fraud and the effects it has on communities. During its 2009 mass reappraisal, the GIS team and appraisers decided to take a closer look at areas with high numbers of foreclosures to ensure the accuracy of their reports. Initially, the statistics appeared sound, but after conducting GIS analysis, Noxious weed locations in Cowlitz County, Washington, captured in the field with GPS and imported into an enterprise geodatabase. the team began to see a different story unfold, especially in the City of Longmont, a foreclosure hot spot with approximately 650 between July 2006 and June 2008. The county’s appraisers uncovered 15 suspicious sales in Longmont, 5 of which the Colorado Division of Real Estate deemed fraudulent. The big surprise came when subsequent GIS analysis showed that the high sales prices of these properties were improperly affecting the values of homes in communities miles away. The 15 suspicious properties in Longmont had relatively high sales figures for the neighborhood, but the appraisers noticed something curious— these homes did not have the most desirable characteristics in the neighborhood. In some cases, they were on interior lots in golf course communities or were right next to a busy road. Though they had less desirable features, they sold for more than those with greater appeal. The regression analysis from the business analytic firm SPSS, Inc., was exported into ArcGIS software and showed that, with the suspicious sales included, 40 percent of properties were falsely inflated for a total of $7.8 million, or falsely deflated for $5.5 million. The net difference was an increase of $2.3 million. The range of influence of suspicious sales, when included in the mass appraisal process, extended well beyond the neighborhoods in which they occurred. “Realizing how far reaching the implications [would have been] if we had not caught the mortgage fraud was a huge wake-up call,” says Danielle Simpson, residential real estate appraiser, Boulder County Assessor’s Office. “Seeing that the impact could occur as far as six miles away from the property with fraudulent transactions was something we would not have guessed.” Though the statistics were technically compliant, appraisers were unable to see the full picture without visualizing the information. “Mapping the data with GIS changed the way we looked at our statistics,” Simpson adds. “It was really interesting and educational to present data spatially instead of on spreadsheets and have appraisers understand in a whole new way how what happens in one place affects what happens in another.” For more information, contact Brooke Cholvin (e-mail: bcholvin@bouldercounty.org) or Danielle Simpson, residential real estate appraiser, Boulder County Assessor’s Office (e-mail: dsimpson@ bouldercounty.org). Cowlitz County, Washington—Sharing the Wealth of GIS, Enterprise Wide Since GIS is valuable across disciplines, governments are finding creative ways to get the technology into the hands of staff members. Cowlitz County, Washington, for example, found that an enterprise license agreement (ELA) provided the best way to support GIS initiatives across the organization while still meeting budget constraints. Located in the southwestern corner of Washington State and home to approximately 100,000 residents, the county wanted to advance its existing GIS to improve services and operations. After acquiring an Esri Small Government ELA in July 2008, data management soon moved to a centralized geodatabase, experts across disciplines began contributing authoritative data, and more employees were using GIS. David Wallis, GISP, chief appraiser, Cowlitz County Assessor’s Office, says, “We’ve moved away from having scattered shapefiles into a world where we have an enterprise geodatabase set up on a server, and we have GIS for the increasing number of users who want to create their own datasets. We have 100 users in the county now instead of 8.” Terry McLaughlin, the Cowlitz County assessor, manages the small GIS department— 2 employees, down from 11 in previous years due to budget constraints. The Assessor’s Office is responsible for maintaining a county basemap, which had been the primary GIS initiative for some time, though other departments used GIS for activities such as environmental review and permitting. “Getting the enterprise license agreement has opened a lot of doors,” notes McLaughlin. “Though our budget hasn’t grown, we can now give more people access to GIS as well as extensions and server GIS.” The county’s approach to acquiring and managing data is also changing. Historically, staff members sent data requests to the GIS department, which would then deliver data and maps. With the new model, experts in each department are beginning to use GIS to create their own datasets. “They are working with data more deeply than we ever could because of their expertise. We want that model to flourish,” says Wallis. For more information, contact David Wallis, chief appraiser, Cowlitz County Assessor’s Office (e-mail: WallisD@co.cowlitz.wa.us.or). For more information about Esri’s enterprise license agreement, visit www.esri.com/ela. As governments continue to lead and innovate in the midst of the economic crisis, GIS continues to support their efforts with tools that enhance their efforts. To learn more about GIS for local government, visit www.esri.com/localgov. Mapping data with GIS changed the way Boulder County, Colorado, analysts looked at statistics.