Tallahassee-Leon County Modernizes Its GIS to Streamline Services and Collaboration

Like many city and county governments, the team at Tallahassee-Leon County, Florida, faces the complex challenge of managing a wide array of services and resources for this heavily populated area. Since 1990, the interlocal agreement between the Leon County government, the City of Tallahassee, and the Leon County Property Appraiser outlines their distinct roles and responsibilities. Sixty interlocal services include departments such as appraisal, planning, development, environmental management, public works, economic vitality, housing and human services, community and media relations, and public safety. 

With so many departments, each with its own internal and external needs, county leaders needed up-to-date spatial data to streamline management and better serve the public in a timely manner. Recognizing the need for connected services, officials within the interlocal partnership embraced geographic information system (GIS) technology early on as a powerful tool to improve operations and decision-making. And since the departments have grown, they continue to keep up to date with advancements in GIS technology. 

Having an enterprise GIS partner like Esri has helped Ned Cake, GIS project manager at Tallahassee-Leon County, and his staff adapt quickly to the changing needs of government departments. “[GIS] cuts down on training and encourages efficiency,” said Cake. 

Cake needed a web application to help facilitate coordination and efficiency across various departments. The GIS team turned to Esri’s ArcGIS Web AppBuilder, an intuitive tool enabling users to build custom online applications for organizing their work. 

The apps are hosted on ArcGIS Online and local web servers. Considering the planned retirement of Web AppBuilder in early 2026, the team faced the urgent task of migrating their applications to ArcGIS Experience Builder. For the past year, staff have used ArcGIS Experience Builder’s tabbed theme to create highly customizable, immersive web apps with 2D and 3D content without disrupting department work.  Each application includes subheaders, tooltips, help, and “contact us” windows. 

“We’ve built templates to promote brand consistency—we want all of our applications internally to have the same look and feel,” said Cake. “Being able to use analytics, cookies, and URL parameters are important to us as well.”

This transition provided seamless functionality, which positioned Tallahassee-Leon County’s interlocal partnership for future innovation.

“The Experience Builder template allows GIS staff to have a starting point that has 70 percent of the functionality needed, so the majority of app development time is spent fine-tuning data actions, searches, and styling that helps meet the unique needs of the department, or the public,” said Cake. “The styling and actions capabilities within Experience Builder really set it apart from Web AppBuilder, and the ‘tooltip’ and ‘help’ windows have reduced calls for assistance from staff and the public.” 

Experience Builder has a high level of customization, which has helped Cake and his team mitigate concerns from personnel using the apps. “We customize the experience for different sizes,” said Cake. “That is important because it allows us to build apps that are more consistent and user-friendly across devices.” 

The migration to Experience Builder has ultimately empowered Leon County’s GIS department to enhance the delivery of data-rich web apps, speeding adoption of GIS across multiple other government departments. 

“[Our customers] are used to having information at their fingertips—we’re simply making it look better, giving them the ability to use it on a tablet or on a cell phone.” Cake emphasized how Experience Builder makes use of group layers from the new Map Viewer, which allows the team to better organize the layers within an application, so it is less overwhelming for end users. “We’re giving them more flexibility than they had before.”