Kern County, California, Uses GIS for e-GovernmentCity of Bakersfield and Kern County (California) elected officials wanted to provide a citizen-centric Web site where residents, Businesses, and visitors could easily find government-related information without regard for jurisdiction or agency. Furthermore, they wanted to embark on the path to e-government where online transactions and digital democracy could one day flourish. In addition to "customer convenience," the officials sought to improve service delivery while reducing overhead costs. And the site could certainly give Kern County a competitive edge for economic development efforts. The staff of at least four jurisdictions within Kern County (City of Bakersfield, County of Kern, Kern County Superintendent of Schools, and Kern Council of Governments) believed in the concept and began collaborating to build what was to become a community portal with local government services. The result was that former Kern County chief administrative officer and recent president of a regional Internet service provider, Joel Heinrichs, assembled a team of online technology specialists specifically for this task-of which Web-enabling GISfor user-friendly access to government information would be an essential component because of its visual appeal and ability to layer spatial information. This team developed into eGovEdge, a Bakersfield, California, company that has taken on the task of delivering government data into the hands of the public by providing a needed service. EGovEdge offers Internet services to government agencies within the Kern region. Its purpose is to deliver spatial data and unleash the power of GIS to the public and to deliver efficient online government services with minimal risk and cost through a citizen-centric, multijurisdictional Web site. EGovEdge has partnered with local newspaper The Bakersfield Californian and hired Lightspeed Technologies to deliver GIS government information through an interactive mapping interface directly to the public. The GIS mapping environment is a subcomponent of a community portal that will consist of government information, services, lifestyle information, and news content for the entire metropolitan Bakersfield, California, area. To demonstrate their ability to deliver relevant and easy-to-use services, eGovEdge has created an interactive mapping site called MapSimple that currently offers GIS information services to locate child care, school information, local government buildings, government representatives, and 2000 election results at the precinct level for the metropolitan area. After detailed research in Web GIS technology, it was determined that Esri's ArcIMS was the best short- and long-term solution. "ArcIMS allowed us to deliver a highly customized site in a relatively short time frame," says Randy Rowles, vice president of eGovEdge. "It also gives us the flexibility to expand our services and grow with the public's needs." EGovEdge's model is to take existing government information and push it out to the public. "We are in no way looking to replace the services the City and County currently perform," Rowles assures. "Both of these agencies have a wealth of information. Cobranding with the communities number one Internet site makes the site easy to find, easier to use, and the increased use will push money back to the departments that supply us with the information." Lightspeed's GIS team chose to go with the ArcIMS HTML client because of its cross-browser compatibility and nonrequirement of an applet download. The open source environment of the HTML client also allows for a tremendous amount of flexibility and the ability to modify the interworkings of ArcIMS without excessive development time. Comments Creighton Magers, GIS analyst/programmer for Lightspeed Technologies, "The flexible development environment that ArcIMS offers has allowed Lightspeed Technologies GIS staff to tap into the powerful spatial components of ArcIMS while utilizing other technologies to handle such things as database queries and even on-the-fly geocoding. By separating out many of the data retrieval tasks, we were able to increase performance. Our team even went so far as to create its own custom geocoding engine, which increased search time by 400 percent. This also allowed for multiple database table searches." The Lightspeed staff built upon the standard ArcIMS interface and incorporated tools to allow the average user to gather information with a minimal number of clicks and virtually no GIS familiarity. Magers explains, "Each site is built with a base set of tools that can easily be expanded upon. These default tools can easily be expanded to allow for the user to further refine their search by care type (e.g., infant, toddler, or after school) and for specified time frames. The power of all of our sites is that we have structured them in a way that easily allows for expandability and modifications. What you see in the child care service can be applied to any similar type of data." For more information about eGovEdge, Lightspeed Technologies, or MapSimple, contact Adam Cabrera, GIS coordinator (adam@ltinetworks.com) or visit www.eGovEdge.com, www.ltinetworks.com or www.mapsimple.com. |
