Bismarck Puts Easier Map Editing Tools in the Hands of City Staff

Bismarck, North Dakota, sits along the banks of the Missouri River, and municipal staff describe it as a river city with “big skies”—scenic sunrises, sunsets, and a landscape shaped by the Missouri River Valley. That geography is central to how residents experience the city because it shapes an extensive network of parks and trails that are used year-round. The Bismarck Parks and Recreation District (BPRD), governed by its own publicly elected park commissioners, maintains over 2,700 acres of parkland, 60 parks, and 85 miles of recreational trails. This includes riverfront trails, trails through city parks and around golf courses, and routes along roadways used by commuters.

The city is also growing with new residents arriving annually. Darrel Nucech, a geographic information system (GIS) developer for the City of Bismarck, said the population was around 65,000 when he moved there in 2009 and is now closer to 77,000. He connected this to the growth of oil field activity in northwestern North Dakota during the early 2010s. But the steady population growth in the capital city has increased the need for city departments that handle public works, public health, fire, police, emergency management, and community development projects. “We were managing all department data and developing applications and web maps for them,” said Nucech. To be responsive and proactive to the needs of residents, the city’s GIS staff housed in the IT department needed more accurate and accessible geospatial, civic, and mapping data from those departments—without hiring more staff.
 

As the need for geospatial data grew, the GIS staff who manage data and develop applications, web maps, and dashboards, needed a way to let IT department staff and additional community partners like BPRD maintain their own data. However, this typically involved a complex desktop system or submitting updates through a ticketed system. Because many mapping workflows required GIS staff to rely on more static files or desktop tools than many occasional users needed, handing off editing responsibilities to other department users was difficult. GIS staff often completed technical work like drawing lines, points, and adjusting tables because the non-daily users could easily get lost in menus or accidentally alter something.

That challenge was especially true for Wendy Berg, park planner at BPRD. Since 2007, she had maintained CAD files, making consistency difficult and limiting how residents could interact with the information, especially on a phone or tablet.

“We were working in an outdated version of CAD,” Berg said. “Maintaining consistency across the system was difficult because our parks range from just a couple of acres to several hundred acres. Since each park map was a separate CAD file that became an individual PDF when uploaded, there was no interactive way to view the entire park system and seamlessly zoom into a specific park.”
 

In 2025, Berg approached the City of Bismarck GIS staff, who were already using ArcGIS Online with about 300 users, and Community Maps Program participants. Her plan was to enhance the online park maps with more detailed information for residents looking for information online.

The city adopted ArcGIS Web Editor to help BPRD manage their own updates. An application providing a straightforward approach, ArcGIS Web Editor enables GIS experts and infrequent users alike to edit from a seamless online interface.

“Web Editor is huge for us . . . we can control a lot behind the scenes, so they don’t have to think about it,” said Jared Auch, GIS developer for the City of Bismarck. “We can create a web map, and limit the fields through a capability within Map Viewer for control over field editing, and we can pare down what the department staff sees, so it’s made the turnaround time faster.”

Implementing ArcGIS Web Editor helped the GIS team shift more day-to-day editing tasks into the hands of the people closer to the work.

“Department staff takes to GIS a lot faster and with less hesitancy,” continued Auch. “They feel like they can do it when they click on a link and the attribute table pops up, then they can create and just draw.”

For Wendy Berg, her work is done much faster and with greater accuracy. “Without Web Editor, I wouldn’t have been able to map all of our parks in the Community Map system,” Berg said. “It has completely transformed the way we create and manage maps across the entire park system, whether they’re used in print or online. Now our communications manager and other staff can access and use the maps as well.”

And in addition to editing online maps, the GIS-based graphics are also now being used for on-site wayfinding signs at parks, making signage consistent with what is seen online. The district also hopes to use the same approach for future trailhead signs.
 

Additionally, Web Editor has been used as a broader citywide strategy to keep GIS accessible for partners and departments outside of BPRD, like the city’s engineering staff who need to update road closures. “I work a lot with the engineering department, and those guys wouldn’t touch GIS before,” said Auch. “Now we can get rid of some that that apprehension, they are more comfortable updating layers that are shared with the public.”

In the past, for road closures, department staff would submit a ticket and wait for a GIS staff person to review the request. Now, a project manager can open a Web Editor experience configured for road closures and update the public-facing layer directly and much faster.

Auch explained the new process moved from days or hours to moments. “Because everything is in Web Editor, it’s also set up for ArcGIS Field Maps, so that engineer can access the same map, and it all looks the same, from mobile to in-office,” he added.

This approach allows internal staff to update data while the public sees it immediately. The city has empowered users to maintain more information themselves, without requiring GIS staff to manage such a large volume of requests.