10
community
october12
2010
Vernonia GIS Ready To Take the Next Step
continued from front page

According to Pickner and
Fousek, Vernonia GIS will be used
by the city to assist in land use issues,
including code and permit enforcement
as well as by city staff for property
parcel management. It will also be
used on multiple levels by the Public
Works Department to map utilities,
track and schedule maintenance, and
plan street repairs and improvements.
It is already being used for flood plain
management and will be used as part of
the Transportation Plan Update that the
city has just begun. Pickner has already
begun reorganizing the database that
the city already has, so information is
easily accessible and can be more easily
analyzed. And the system will also be
used to catalogue and manage assets
that are valuable to the city, like water
meters.

“For me, personally, it is a treat
to see the GIS platform emerging,” says
City Administrator Haack. “I cut my
teeth in college learning geology and
geography using pencils and paper to
create maps that led to a social science
degree, so it is humbling to see what
changes are made in this field since the
60’s and 70’s and what a service to a
community mapping still is.”

Maybe most importantly,
Vernonia GIS will give the City a way to
document its “Institutional Memory”-- in
other words, the recording of information
that is often lost or hard to recover or
locate when the city has a changeover
in personnel, staff, committee members
or elected officials. “A key function of
GIS,” says Fousek, “is that when things
happen, the system is recording them and
storing them forever. So when the City
wants to do something, they can have a
realistic snapshot of what is really going
on, and a clear understanding of how a
project or issue developed to a certain
point.”

Fousek and Pickner believe
Vernonia GIS will help the City make
better decisions, save money, and
improve efficiency and help the city
manage itself, its staff, its projects and
funding.

“In my experience with GIS,
that’s what it’s always been about--
find a way to improve systems that are
already in place or to model information
in a way that a computer can analyze it
much more effectively than individuals
can,” says Pickner.

Pickner
officially
started
working on the project on September
1st. He is a 2005 graduate of Southern
Oregon University with a Bachelor of
Science Degree in Geography, with a
Minor in Land Use Planning. He also
holds a GIS Graduate Certificate from
Portland State University.

Vernonia GIS will be looking
at past records and data sets and
analyzing project management methods.
It’s further development is expected
to uncover many inefficiencies, past
mistakes and poor decision-making by
the city. “We’re obviously going to find
issues,” says Pickner. “But the idea is
that from this point forward, let’s try to
improve how we are functioning.”

“My vision is to find major
challenges for the city,” says Pickner.
“What are the most important things
that we can set up and help the city do
for long-term use-- get them identified,
developed and put in place.”

The use of data in a spatial format
as opposed to rows and columns is what
makes GIS so unique and functional in a
public jurisdiction. GIS often works in
map formats and has the ability to place
layers of data over those maps to help
analyze and show patterns and clusters.
“I’m really taking tools that have been
designed for other municipalities and
just utilizing them,” says Pickner. “I’m
not reinventing the wheel, I’m just taking
the wheel and attaching it to Vernonia.”

Pickner is very aware of the
city’s current limited financial resources
and will focus on developing programs
that will be cost-effective or save the
city money. “I know the city has a
very limited budget, so my goal is to
find individual projects that will benefit
the city and hopefully provide extra
funding,” says Pickner. “That is a huge
goal of mine-- find ways to save or make
the city money.”
“GIS allows
you to pinpoint where best to spend
resources,” says Fousek. “When the
city makes a decision to spend capital
on projects, they and the citizens know,
because we have this system in place,
that the money is being spent in the best
possible way and are getting the most
improvement for the dollar.”

And that’s where, according to
Fousek and Pickner, the rest of Vernonia
citizens can play a role.

“For users of GIS, it is often
defined as ‘Hardware, Software, Data,
and People’-- and ‘People’ is the most
important factor,” says Fousek. “And
it’s not just GIS People, but the end-
users and the people who benefit from
what the GIS system is doing. In other
words, the community as a whole.”

Fousek and Pickner are still
developing ideas about how to best
communicate with the Vernonia
community about the development of
the GIS system, and how to receive
and integrate community input. But for
Vernonia GIS to be most effective, it will
need citizen involvement on some level.

“The benefit of getting multiple
inputs is that it allows us to develop it
further,” says Pickner. “Without that
input, there are the limitations of us not
knowing what we are missing. I really
feel a major design piece for this project
for the city is to find the flaws in the
system. If we can set up a system that
makes the city manage itself better, then
it will really provide the benefit that it
initially set out to do.”

Fousek believes that Vernonia is
actually getting itself ahead of the curve
by developing a GIS system early. GIS
will be the wave of the future as far as
collecting, recording and sharing data
and information. The system that he and
Pickner are envisioning for this small
community of 2,370 people will be the
envy of small communities around the
state. “This will be as good or better
than any system that a town of this size
has anywhere in the state of Oregon,”
says Fousek. “It’s pretty rare for a city
of this size to have this kind of system,”
adds Pickner.

Fousek believes a good GIS
system will help when the city goes
to recruit new staff. He also believes
it will help the city deal with future
requirements as GIS becomes more
mainstream and used by more county
and state agencies. “The state will
eventually demand that every public
jurisdiction have a GIS system and be
able to provide specific GIS data,” says
Fousek. “Some of these systems are
already being built by the state.”

As Vernonia GIS develops, even
more uses will hopefully be uncovered.
Pickner is planning to write a monthly
newspaper column that will be printed
in Vernonia’s Voice which will help keep
the citizens of Vernonia informed about
the progress of Vernonia GIS.
If you have questions or would like more
information about Vernonia GIS, you can
contact Sean Pickner at vernoniagis@
gmail.com