Present: Vickey Bagley, William Burris, Christine O'Connor, Steve Whitney, Donald Ijams, Daniel Casey, Steve Balance, Mark McConnell, Mary Szczepanski, Sandy Elder, Larry Cassen, Eleanor Sees, Teri Schultz, Jack Avis, Robert MacArthur and Fran LaSala

Will the Earth Move when Pima County Coordinates are Reprojected? What you should do before and after Phase I of the Orthophoto Rectification Project.

Steve Whitney reported on the progress of this ongoing project. The transition is going smoothly and the Pima County DOT/GIS staff expect to have most layers moved from the NAD27 to the NAD83 datum by Monday. The only exceptions may be the individual parcel drawings, which most people do not use. After the switchover, the parcel base will not see updates for approximately a week; MapGuide may not have updates for two weeks. The NAD27 data will go to the \mars4\az\counties\pima\shapes directory after this weekend; it might change, but there will be an e-mail sent to everyone on the Pima GIS Group on Monday. The current plans are to keep the NAS27 data frozen online for a year.

For each organization's local data, a decision will have to be made regarding whether the organization will be projecting its own data or supplying it to Steve's group, who will project it. For AutoCad data, Steve's group can load software on the local organization's network or the data can be supplied to Steve's group, who will project it.

It should be remembered that the current changes are Phase I and just involve re-projected data. This Phase does not include rubber sheeting, which is the 2nd Phase of the project and is about two months down the road. The parcel base will probably be the first layer to be rubber-sheeted.

Street Master File: Reconciling ADPARCEL with STNETALL

Jack Avis reported on the ongoing progress in this area. There are currently 310,000 addresses in this file, changes to which are reflected every night in the recreated ADCOUNTY and its subset ADPARCEL. 14,000 (four percent) of these addresses were found to have one problem or another when matched against STNETALL (Pima County master steet network file) in September 2000.

After TPD produced the list of exceptions, Jack's team separated them by jurisdiction for analysis, beginning with addresses in the City of Tucson. There were 3,500 problematic addresses in the City. 617 of these had addressing related issues and 316 of these were in Civano. Some corrections have already been made in the system. They have found wrong address numbers, locations, directions, street names, and suffixes. Part of the problem was that editing features were not functioning well early on. 1,500 of the 3,000 came from an entire subdivision missing in STNETALL. This error happens because Development Services work begins prior to the finalization of the subdivision development process.

Jack's group have also found street segments missing (700 total countywide). Of the 3,500, 364 addresses had no problem, with 600 still needing investigation. The effort is ongoing to look at STNETALL issues and work with Steve's team. Jack and Don pointed out that 96% accuracy is already good, and these efforts will only build on that excellent base.

GIS Training

The announcement for the January "Introduction to ArcView" class has gone out and response has been good (attendees received a copy). Seven of the ten slots are already filled. Vicky has been working with callers to make sure that there is a good fit with the student and class selection; some people really need the GIS basics class initially. There is also a filled class next week with 2 students from other agencies, 2 students from TPD (Co-op funded), and two Transportation students (Transportation funded).

One issue that has emerged is the need for ArcView licenses, which are relatively expensive at approximately $800 each. Planning for purchases needs to be done carefully, since a new, additional upgrade path (to ArcView 8.1) will soon be an option. County Development Services has some metering software to facilitate license sharing, and Don has begun looking into this and is working with IT on network related issues. TPD is also looking at ArcExplorer for some of their staff who do not necessarily require ArcView. The Cooperative may need to make budget adjustments later in the year if the software bottleneck continues.

The GIS Basic Concepts curriculum is still under development. It is planned as a three-hour block of time to bring people up to speed on GIS. Current plans are for a run through in January 2001 and the delivery of the first class toward the end of January or the beginning of February. The Cooperative may rent a large space to allow for a large number of attendees.

GIS FY 2001-02 Budget

Don distributed a copy of the budget and new program request that were submitted for the Cooperative in the Information Technology FY 2001-02 submission. The major change is the new program request for a City Spatial Data Coordinator in order to optimize GIS benefits. Don will be representing the Cooperative to the City's Operating Budget Committee, made up of a number of City department heads, and also in the IT budget meeting with the City Manager. In the coming months, the Cooperative will need to carefully monitor expenditures and make any necessary adjustments.

CityScan Implementation

The GIS Cooperative advisory group has met three times with David Hochede, the City Scan project manager. The project team has been exploring underlying issues including engaging in thin client programming for a City application. They have ESRI MapObjects in now and a copy of ArcIMS is expected soon.

Don distributed a copy of a request he submitted to IT's Strategic Initiatives group to do a "sixty day" project to create an address locator that could eventually become part of CityScan. This project will allow the entry of a Tucson street address and return a variety of elements on that address such as: neighborhood name, assessor's parcel number, property owner, jurisdiction indicator, City ward number, council member's name and contact information, and similar information for state representation. He has not heard back from IT whether the project will be undertaken.

GIS Intergovernmental Agreement

Work progresses in this area. Ron Platt has given Steve Whitney all the City comments, and he is working on incorporating them into the draft. A number of issues have been clarified, including the sharing of internet map resources, developing as many redundancies as possible, and ensuring proper stewardship. This will be reviewed by Ron and Steve after revisions, and then by the attorneys for a last look before going to the two governing bodies.

Roundtable of Dept./Office GIS Activities

Police: TPD is trying to assist its staff to use GIS as a tool, but as already mentioned, access to software is an issue. ArcExplorer may be useful to some users instead of ArcView. TPD is currently producing a daily shapefile with current crime data for their intranet mapping application. Daniel Casey is looking into upgrading this application from MapObjects IMS to ArcIMS (using a low cost upgrade available before December 31st). TPD has been working with the U of A, on an application called COPLink that builds links among TPD data types and makes extended searching available. Daniel and the U of A staff are considering a mapping extension for COPLink. Since their work is in Java, ArcIMS may make more sense.

Water: The RFP process for valve map conversion will close on December 18th unless a planned amendment extends the timetable. An excellent five-day ArcInfo class was recently held that used ArcMap, ArcCatalog, and ArcToolbox. They banged away on the products with no glitches. However, this class is being broken up and will not be offered as one unit in the future. Water recently discovered that the automated valve turner on their trucks has an Access program using MapsObject and will be taking advantage of that feature.

Planning: They are busy getting ready for the 2000 U.S. Census information distribution. They expect the extensive data flow to begin in March 2001. They are also doing a lot of work on a proposed 27 square mile annexation on the South side of the City. As already noted, GIS training development work is ongoing.

Solid Waste: They are in the process of identifying the location of all residential containers with GPS. They also need to put together a map containing all mobile home parks. Vicky from Planning has a dataset and can supply! Solid Waste is going to hire a GIS technician. A pre-bid conference was held as part of their routing software acquisition effort.

Environmental Management: For the last year and a half they have been fine tuning their environmental data management system. At first they worked on just the database, but soon will add mapping; they will do a presentation at the January 2001 GIS Cooperative meeting. The next step is to put the application on the City's intranet (Water is interested on a limited base and Solid Waste wants to track their regulatory compliance issues). The RFP for the web development part is currently out for bid and is due on the 20th. This is an opportunity for staff around the City to have information that will help them in addressing ongoing environmental issues.

Juvenile Court: Data Warehouse project is ongoing within the Courts, they are now trying to work with criminal justice agencies and schools on making their data a part of this. They plan a GIS phase, but will have to work through the difficulties of integrating the data.

Fire: The hiring of an IT Specialist will allow Eleanor to start working on GIS. They are interested in trends in areas such as disease, illness, and accident pattern tracking. They are in the process of finishing the last part of their reporting system.

University of Arizona: They are still looking for educational opportunities working with local data and are regularly meeting with several members of the Cooperative. They have three proposals already and are exploring grant opportunities.

The next GIS Cooperative meeting will be held Friday, January 12, 2001 in the City IT Pueblo Rm.