• Geography—The Portland metropolitan region encompasses four counties and 26 cities (i.e., Metro’s jurisdiction plus the city of Vancouver, Washington, and Clark County, Washington). • Technology—GIS was emerging as a mature software in the 1980s. • Data—PGE had then recently digitized the tax lot lines for its five-county service area. The data has been regularly updated since. • Main funding sources—Seed money came from Metro’s budget, contributions from local governments, federal funds for transportation planning, and sales of RLIS products. • People—The success of RLIS is largely due to its key champions, who understood planning and demonstrated the value of GIS to local decision makers. Key Operational Choices A few early operational choices by Metro staff members were key to the success of RLIS. First and foremost, they decided to build a GIS, rather than a CAD system, despite the fact that Multnomah County, which had already invested millions of dollars in its CAD systems, pushed Metro hard to follow that path. In addition, they chose to take on parcel-level data and set up the data model cooperatively with the local jurisdictions, which then all adopted it. The local jurisdictions provided quarterly the data they produced in the normal course of business, which the DRC then stitched together and returned to the jurisdictions in the form of the whole region, without any money changing hands. From the start, Metro has collected data for each COVER STORIES RLIS layer from the agency that relies on it the most and built only the layers that it can reliably maintain. A regional GIS steering committee has fostered regional cooperation, and Metro has kept the structure of RLIS as stable as possible to enable comparisons over time. Another vital decision was to set up an aerial photography consortium to buy a single annual flight for the whole region, which ensures consistency and greatly reduces costs. What RLIS Has Made Possible RLIS has enormously impacted planning in the Portland area, and many applications have been built on top of it. It keeps people from getting into useless arguments by providing a very transparent and peer-reviewed fact base. RLIS has provided planners with a new set of tools that enables them to model, simulate, and plan future land development in detail—including the first parcel-level basemap and land-use maps for the region; new mapping and analytic tools that enabled the growth concept to emerge at the parcel level; and many new ways to measure and monitor environmental, social, and economic variables. RLIS has also enabled the creation of new tools for citizen involvement, including modeling that shows the impacts of user-defined land-use policy choices, and has created opportunities for entrepreneurs, such as way-finding software. Additionally, RLIS combines the information about parcels, such as assessed land values, sales values, and property taxes, with regulatory and environmental variables, such as zoning, floodplains, wetlands, and slopes. Finally, cities and counties have incorporated RLIS data into their planning information database, developers use Metro’s vacant lands inventory to find land available for construction, environmental organizations and neighborhood associations use RLIS to map out their strategies, and consultants and scholars use RLIS for policy analysis and research. 7 The Future of RLIS Metro’s staff is reevaluating the methods it uses to maintain and distribute RLIS data and is moving toward a more enterprise-centric model, with a central multiuser geodatabase at the hub. This will allow Metro to maintain data and distribute it to partners and subscribers on a more frequent schedule. Distribution methods will include ArcGIS services, direct FTP downloads, and direct network connections to the server. These different forms of connectivity will also lay the groundwork for experimenting with distributed editing with local data partners. In the future, RLIS might allow users to edit and download data directly, through a server. New uses of RLIS might include gathering information about energy consumption and carbon emissions at the building level. Some hope that, ultimately, RLIS could be continuously updated and serve data as a service. About the Author Matteo Luccio is the president of Pale Blue Dot Research, Writing, and Editing, LLC (www. palebluedotllc.com), which specializes in public policy and geospatial technologies. He has been writing about geospatial technologies since 2000 for eight different technical publications and was previously a public policy research analyst for a private think tank and for state and local government agencies. More Information For more information, contact Paul Couey, manager, Metro Data Resource Center (e-mail: paul.couey@oregonmetro.gov, tel.: 503-7971897, Web: www.oregonmetro.gov/drc), or Matteo Luccio, president, Pale Blue Dot Research, Writing, and Editing, LLC (e-mail: matteo@palebluedotllc.com, tel.: 541-543-0525). To view a longer version of this article, visit www.palebluedotllc.com. AN Watersheds in the Portland metropolitan area, which is located at the confluence of the Columbia River and the Willamette River. Aerial photo of Portland’s Ladd’s Addition residential district.