Waukesha County and Its Cities Collaborate to Weave a Parcel Fabric

Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and its 37 municipalities have been working together building a parcel dataset since the early 1990s. While the initial data creation was completed by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, subsequent maintenance and updates fell under the county's purview. Because the cities of Brookfield, New Berlin, and Waukesha conducted their own tax listing functions, the county and these municipal partners developed a unique parcel maintenance strategy. These communities wanted control of the maintenance activities for parcels within their borders. Having control meant they could add parcels on their own schedule and not have to wait for the county to provide them with updated data.

As one can imagine, working in ArcMap in four different databases covering different geographic areas made for some workflow challenges. It meant that every time the county wanted to post a quarterly update to its geographic information system (GIS) department web page, it required deleting the three communities from the publication database, acquiring a parcel data export from the municipalities, and merging it into the county's data to make a seamless map. The process was automated as much as it could be but still took a significant work effort.

With the advent of the ArcMap parcel fabric model, the county saw the opportunity to change its workflow and data model to better facilitate accurate parcel entry inside a standardized model. In 2016, after discussion with the GIS coordinators for the three cities, the county hired Panda Consulting to assist in migrating data to the ArcMap parcel fabric model and developing a workflow to ensure that all stakeholders had a clear understanding of the data model and update process.

Frank Conkling at Panda Consulting has been a GIS parcel guru at the national level for years and proved to be an invaluable contact throughout the data migration and editing process configuration. His knowledge of the tools and best practices, as well as his close contact with the Esri development team, helped when it came time to train the county and municipal staff on the data editing process. Before long, the county and its municipal partners were efficiently editing parcels in the ArcMap parcel fabric.

Despite this migration, however, the county was still tethered to deleting and merging these municipal datasets from the county-wide publication database on a quarterly basis. The process required reminders to the communities to send their data, followed by significant effort to merge it into the county's database. It wasn't a perfect process, but it worked.

As technology advanced, Esri developed ArcGIS Parcel Fabric using ArcGIS Pro. In 2020, the county and the three participating cities began discussing the pros and cons of moving to the new ArcGIS Parcel Fabric. As with any technology leap, there were a fair amount of apprehension and plenty of questions about how the data updates would be conducted by the disparate stakeholders.

Based on previous experience, the county turned to Panda Consulting again for guidance and help. Before long, a contract was developed, and work began. Early in the process, it was determined that branch versioning using feature services would allow each municipality to edit its data through a shared county feature service. This would eliminate the need for data clipping, extraction, and subsequent merging, resulting in time-saving efficiencies.

When asked about the experience, Conkling had this to say: "The ArcMap parcel fabric within the Local Government Information Model was rather inflexible and did not allow for the types of implementations that Waukesha County was seeking. Given the flexibility of the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric, we were able to design and implement a newer technology solution and provide the county with a single, seamless countywide parcel fabric, effectively eliminating the issues associated with aggregating the multiple previous ArcMap parcel fabrics. In addition, we also were able to allow the county and the three municipalities to view, edit, and adjust [data] within their respective jurisdictional limits. We were also able to migrate the existing geodatabase annotation into a point labeling process that enhances the editing and display of parcel dimensions using attribute rules."

ArcGIS Pro enables users to use the county portal for editing parcels. All three communities are currently doing their own parcel editing from the county's centralized database. This has enabled the county to post parcel updates to its GIS application monthly instead of quarterly. Furthermore, the municipal partners have a direct connection to the database, allowing them to export parcels for their own municipal websites.

Waukesha County credits its success to its municipal partners and the sound advice and services of Panda Consulting. Brad Blumer, GIS coordinator for the City of Waukesha, had this to say about the project: "By partnering with the county, the City of Waukesha migrated from a simplistic parcel schema to the parcel fabric. We benefited from the local expertise and knowledge transfer as well as the training conducted by Panda Consulting. For the city, this project has been a win-win as both contributors and consumers of the Parcel Fabric. As contributors, we enjoy ease of access to the editing environment without the burden of database management and parcel consolidation workflows. As consumers, we benefit from up-to-date parcel data in our own and neighboring communities."

Without the cooperation, buy-in, and technical expertise of these municipal partners, none of this collaborative editing could happen. Hopefully, as the Esri data model and Parcel Fabric tools continue to develop, this intergovernmental partnership will continue to make the parcel update process seamless and efficient. 

Jim Landwehr, land information system (LIS) supervisor for Waukesha County, has over 35 years of experience in the GIS and AM/FM mapping industry in both the public and private sectors. He has been working with Esri software for over 20 years and is proud of the Waukesha County Land Information Office's accomplishments, which include winning the Esri Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award in 2004 and 2018. Landwehr earned a bachelor's degree in geography and anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 1985. He also enjoys writing and has published four memoirs and five books of poetry.