A Forward-Looking Municipality

The City of Richmond, Va. is a growing city of over 200,000 people with a diverse set of public needs. The City government is at the heart of providing such services to the rapidly changing Richmond community. Often, due to these growing requirements, City services are faced with stretched budgets, lack of resources and shorter deadlines to implement projects. The City of Richmond is a forward-looking municipality that is always looking for more efficient methods to provide services to the community. In July 1999, the City launched the development of its Geographic Information System (GIS) by contracting with Michael Baker Jr., Inc. (Baker) for data development and other consulting services. For many municipalities, GIS is an example of a service often faced with long timelines and implementation schedules. As a result, the GIS process generally produces savings in cost, with quality, services and results only near the end of a project. This often leaves the GIS line item susceptible to politics and budget battles. Additionally, the City's GIS division was facing typical issues with maintaining and distributing the ever-increasing amounts of geospatial data.

How to Show Value

The challenge was to find a way to show value for the many diverse uses of GIS information while at the same time making it broadly available to its users. The products that could illustrate this would have to stand on their own as innovative solutions to the City's mandated and diverse responsibilities. Everything from tax assessment maps, economic development and utilities maintenance to emergency management, public information and city administration could potentially benefit if real applications could be implemented. One key challenge was to reduce work redundancies and administrative costs by making the City's valuable orthophotography investment available to as many users within city government and the community as possible.

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