Portland Trailblazes a Successful Regional GIS continued from cover Highlights „ RLIS has provided planners with a new set of tools based on GIS. „ A primary purpose of RLIS is to monitor land development and future growth capacity. „ Any jurisdiction that contributes data to RLIS gets free RLIS data. miles, through two visionary arrangements. First, it convinced the region’s electric utility company, PGE, to share its CAD file of tax lot boundaries. In return, Metro would return the file to PGE in GIS format and produce quarterly updates. Second, Metro offered to share its system with the cities and counties in its jurisdiction in exchange for their agreement to maintain the data and give Metro periodic updates. To gain support from Metro’s leadership, the project team quickly produced a map to demonstrate the system’s capabilities. Metro also engaged in entrepreneurial efforts to generate revenue to cover approximately 40 percent of RLIS’ maintenance costs. The business community supported these efforts, because they would allow Metro to produce the accurate and timely data it needed. From the beginning in 1989, Metro standardized RLIS on Esri products and developed data standards cooperatively with its local partners. Today, real estate and development companies routinely purchase RLIS data and use Metro’s map Web site. Emergency management agencies pay Metro to maintain their street address files. To partly automate public access to RLIS data, Metro has developed a Web interface and sells annual subscriptions to the RLIS Lite quarterly CD-ROM series. Planning in Oregon In 1973, Oregon mandated all jurisdictions to develop comprehensive plans, and the next year it required every incorporated city to adopt an urban growth boundary (UGB) encompassing a 20-year reserve of land. Responsibility for the Portland UGB falls on Metro, which serves more than 1.4 million residents. In the early 1980s, Metro began to develop transportation models and forecasts; in the late 1980s, the statewide planning law required it to review its UGB, and it began to develop regional urban growth goals and objectives; and in 1992, Metro and the local jurisdictions began a planning process that led to the adoption of a 50-year vision for urban growth within Metro’s boundaries. RLIS RLIS was started as a pilot project in 1989, and an operational GIS was ready early in 1991—that is, RLIS was born at about the same time as this planning process and yielded its first products at about the same time that the urban growth goals and objectives were adopted. Using RLIS to drive transportation and air quality models using parcellevel data for the first time, Metro was able to test alternative growth scenarios. Metro designed RLIS in collaboration with planners, with the aim of identifying the requirements of a GIS that would support both community and regional planning and provide consistent land information across jurisdictional boundaries. For the basemap, regional planners preferred a much cheaper and simpler zonal system, to determine whether a tax lot is vacant, partly vacant, or developed. GIS Powers the Model At first, Metro’s Data Resource Center (DRC), which created and manages RLIS, used all the Esri GIS tools then available to build and maintain the main RLIS components, such as boundaries, streets, and tax lots. Metro took advantage of ArcView software’s shapefile format to release RLIS Lite in 1996, which allowed it to distribute the data, without tiling, in a format that could be used by a wider audience. In 1998, Metro used MapObjects to write an application for its Recycling Information Center. Metro was an early adopter of ArcSDE in 1998 and for 10 years used it for data publishing only. In 1999, it installed ArcIMS, which served ArcSDE layers to the public. From 2000 to 2008, Metro worked on converting its legacy ARC Macro Language (AML)/coverage processes to ArcGIS, and by 2008 it had converted all editing to a multiuser geodatabase. Metro also frequently uses ArcReader, ArcGIS Spatial Analyst, Esri Business Analyst, and ArcGIS 3D Analyst for its project-level work. Now the DRC devotes about half its staff time to serving the internal data and mapping needs of Metro departments, about a third to serving the needs of partner jurisdictions, and about a tenth to providing services to the public. Key Factors A unique combination of factors required and enabled the development of RLIS and its successful implementation: • Public policy—The state mandated UGBs and a process of periodic review. A map of zoning classifications, made possible at this level of detail by RLIS using U.S. census tracts or traffic analysis zones. However, planners for local jurisdictions, whose financial support was essential for RLIS, preferred one based on tax lots, which would enable community-scale planning and linking tax lots to county assessor records. Therefore, the regional planners agreed to take on the huge task of building a tax lot-based GIS. Twenty years later, Metro now depends on this level of acuity for such projects as land-use forecasting. To accomplish that task, Metro then outsourced the conversion from CAD to GIS of PGE’s tax lot data, which took 16 months. The polygons were assigned tax lot ID numbers, linking them to tabular tax assessment records. The Oregon Department of Transportation provided street centerlines, street names, city limits, rivers, and other layers. Streets are now the alternate base layer in RLIS and are used for vehicle routing, thematic mapping, census data, and transportation analysis zones. A primary purpose of RLIS is to monitor land development and future growth capacity. To accurately identify vacant land, since 1991 Metro has relied on annual true-color digital orthorectified aerial photography for the region. Each year, two GIS technicians spend two months updating the inventory by overlaying current building permit records over aerial photos and applying strict rules The People Behind Metro’s RLIS RLIS came into being principally through the efforts of the following people: • Dick Bolen was a geographer, had been a planner, and was very knowledgeable in GIS. He had a good budget and great support from the Metro Council to make GIS into a useful planning tool. He set up RLIS with all the information a planner would want. • Alan Holsted did maps by hand from 1972 to 1988, using Mylar, pen and ink, and Zipitone. According to Bolen, Holsted “is the unsung hero of all this, the guy that really was doing the work.” Bolen and Holsted demonstrated RLIS to the legislature to obtain an exemption from the public records law so that Metro could sell RLIS products. • Andy Cotugno, who was Metro’s transportation planning director, made the strategic decision to fund the development of RLIS. • John Fregonese, who was Metro’s planning director, was one of the first RLIS users. • Bob Haas, who worked for Washington County, helped Bolen get RLIS started, and his county was the first jurisdiction to get on board. He came up with a “responsibility matrix” that spelled out the role of each jurisdiction. • David Asherman produced great maps using ArcInfo, which elevated RLIS in front of the Metro Council and showed how GIS could be used. “His nickname was Picasso,” says Bolen. • Ethan Seltzer was hired at Metro in 1988 as the land-use coordinator. • Dale Himes, at David Evans and Associates, Inc., converted the PGE data from CAD to GIS. • Marshall Payne was a principal at GeoNorth, LLC, an Esri Business Partner, which wrote code for RLIS. • Ray Phelps, then assistant to Metro’s executive officer, Rena Cusma, secured funding for RLIS, mostly out of the budget for the agency’s solid waste department.