Feature Polk County Enterprise GIS Flood Data Other Business Data ArcSDE ArcGIS Server Internet The process for accessing flood information insurance offices or emergency shelters within a certain drive time or distance from a parcel and perhaps generate optimized routes to and from those locations. These tools will help educate county residents so they can protect themselves before and during a flood. These activities could also allow residents to benefit from lower flood insurance rates. [The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) offers reasonably priced flood insurance for communities that comply with its minimum standards for floodplain management. NFIP's Community Rating System (CRS), a voluntary program, provides incentives for communities that exceed minimum standards.] This upgrade will significantly improve all four factors that CRS considers: public information, mapping and regulations, flood damage reduction, and flood preparedness. These improvements could enhance the CRS rating for Polk County, resulting in lower flood insurance rates for county homeowners and renters. Conclusion Currently, about 25 percent of the flood studies have been incorporated in the GIS. Once completed, this will be a major source for flood protection data that can be accessed, analyzed, and shared internally and externally. It will significantly save time and money for the county and its residents. This method retrieves information more effectively than the current paper process with paper data. For more information, contact Mehdi Mashud Khan, GISP, GIS Supervisor Polk County Board of County Commissioners E-mail: mehdikhan@polk-county.net Tel.: 863-534-7518 About the Authors Mehdi Mashud Khan (primary author) manages the GIS team at the Polk County IT in Bartow, Florida. He has a decade of experience as a GIS professional with responsibilities ranging from application development, administering Web GIS, and database management to GIS analysis and data editing. Prior to joining Polk County, he was a GIS manager at the Department of Health and Environmental Control in South Carolina. His area of interest is creating a total GIS for state/local governments that will integrate and serve diverse government units and improve their services. Khan, who started his career as a design architecture, CAD, and visualization expert, is also very interested in integrating CAD, building information modeling, and GIS. Randall Vogel (coauthor) has more than five years of experience with FEMA floodplain regulatory and insurance processes. His primary professional interests include ensuring that flood map regulatory data is used in a way that encourages safe and sustainable development of land and water resources. He also has experience in policy design, analysis, and implementation. Ronald O. Edwards (coauthor) has been working as a GIS technician at Polk County IT/GIS for the last six years. Prior to joining the GIS team, he worked with the county utilities department for nine years assisting engineers with water/wastewater design. Edwards, who is passionate about the environment, started his professional career in that field. He has a bachelor's degree in business administration and an associate's degree in environmental engineering. Users a different permit. Floodplain Management staff needs to be consulted in determining that. 4. Find out which datum was used (e.g., National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929 [ft. NAVD 29] or North American Vertical Datum of 1988 [ft. NAVD 88]). 5. Consult submitted paperwork for storm water calculations if the BFE is not on the drawings. 6. Scan the paper drawing using a large-format scanner. 7. Georeference the scanned images, because they do not have any spatial information. To properly incorporate these images with other study area data, align spatial data to the image file using tools in ArcGIS. 8. Use editing and drawing tools in ArcGIS to digitize the studies and save them in the GIS. 9. Add attribute data along with flood-specific information (e.g., the study site name, name of the engineering firm, study year). Impact and Benefits Once this new GIS layer is completed, it will be a great source of information for Polk County Floodplain Management and its customers. The parcel layer is overlaid on the floodplain layer so county employees can quickly locate a parcel and determine the proximity of BFE and flood zones to that parcel. This will provide valuable flood information to landowners without requiring an expensive flood study. Planners will also have better information for flood management. Potentially, this layer could be used online by county residents through Web GIS. By eliminating the need to contact the county, the county employee workload would be significantly reduced, saving money for the county and, ultimately, its residents. With the help of ArcGIS Server technology, users could not only acquire flood information but also perform GIS analysis online without actually learning GIS. For example, a user could find the locations of flood www.esri.com ArcUser Fall 2010 37