Chris Warneford, Kenton County’s public works director, approached NKAPC staff last year about developing a website that would provide near-real-time status of snow crews on county-maintained roads. Warneford requested a website that would be easy to use while providing citizens with valuable information about street conditions.

“Kenton County citizens’ safety is our number one priority. Whether going to work, the grocery, or taking their children to school, they need to be able to plan their road trips safely,” Warneford says.

The County’s public works team will be able to update the status of roads as plow and truck operators complete sections that have been treated. The street status will be classified as plowed, treated, plowed and treated, and no activity. “It was important to the public works team that we could update the road status from anywhere in the field without having to go into the office.” said Warneford.

NKAPC staff created a data entry form that public works personnel can access from any computer with internet access. It not only records the status, but has a time stamp feature so citizens viewing the map know when the road was last treated. This feature is important especially during a snow event that may span several days. When fully operational, the website will be available to commuters on area roads through a mobile data client.

The website is currently being tested by Fiscal Court personnel and will be rolled out soon to the public. In addition to county-maintained roads, city streets that are maintained by the County under contract will be added to the website. The City of Crestview Hills has already been added to the snow tracker website. Other Kenton County cities will be added in the future.

Aerial Imagery Acquisition, Digital Orthoimagery Production, LiDAR Acquisition, Digital Elevation Dataset Production, Digital Oblique Aerial Imagery Acquisition/Production & Associated Application Software, and Photogrammetric Updates and New Compilation of GIS Planimetric Mapping

Please use this link to view the RFP

To download the county boundaries, grid layout and monumentation control, click here.

More information about using the tool can be found here.

To see how to add this data and use it, please visit this link.  You will need Adobe Flash to view this tutorial.

Currently, the Kenton and Campbell County Fiscal Courts, a number of cities in each county, the water and sanitation districts, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Duke Energy, and just recently Cincinnati Bell, upload their construction projects to the GIS-based database called Envista.

All participating entities can see current and upcoming projects through the central communication tool, and can identify conflicts and opportunities to work together.

“This tool is helping cut down on the time spent coordinating,” said NKAPC’s deputy director for GIS administration, Trisha Brush, GISP. “This empowers each of the participating jurisdictions to use their road construction and maintenance dollars wisely—which ultimately benefits the tax- and rate-payers who pay the bills.”

The City of Covington recently used information from the system to collaborated with the water district on a few streets where the city had plans to repave and the water district had plans to replace water mains. “Coordinating this work through Envista saved the city $18,000,” said Mike Yeager, PE, MPA, assistant Covington city engineer.

“The program made an immediate impact on the way the City of Covington coordinates utility work with our resurfacing projects,” said Yeager. “Not only are we provided with an email as soon as a potential conflict is detected, the city and the various utility companies are now able to coordinate and prioritize projects into the future based upon each others needs and budgets.”

Brush says this is just one example of the savings that program participants are realizing by collaborating in this regional effort. This, she asserts, will benefit everyone because these savings will allow more road work to be completed.

NKAPC is wrapping up phase four of the project currently with plans to finish uploading all remaining jurisdictions into the database. “After this phase is completed, we plan to start a user’s group for all the jurisdictions participating in the program,” Brush said.

The quarterly user’s group meetings will give NKAPC feedback on the software and allow users to put a face with a name for those with whom they’re coordinating.

The Envista online coordination tool is being funded jointly by Kenton and Campbell County Fiscal Courts, the Kenton and Campbell County PVAs, Northern Kentucky Water District, SD1, and NKAPC.

Christy Powell, GISP, one of NKAPC’s senior GIS specialists, represented NKAPC and the LINK-GIS partnership by presenting a conference session entitled ‘Succeeding in a Slow Economy: Financing, Implementing, and Supporting GIS on a budget.’ Powell’s presentation included staff’s experience with revamping the LINK-GIS website.

“We thought it would be a good topic because of the recession’s impact on local GIS budgets,” Powell said. “We discussed our website project, the benefits we achieved by working with two contractors, and how we accomplished our goal within a limited budget.”

Billed as ‘The Biggest GIS Event on Earth,’ the conference brought together over 16,000 GIS users and company executives from over 140 countries, who gather to attend technical sessions and connect with other GIS users.

ESRI used this year’s conference as a platform to roll out its new ArcGIS 10 software. NKAPC will download this upgrade and begin learning its new features in the near future.

NKAPC’s feature in the conference’s 25th Anniversary Map Book gave conference attendees a look at how LINK-GIS mapping has progressed since its inception over two decades ago. This annual product includes a sampling of high-quality maps from local, state, and federal government agencies.

“Our maps were included in the “Now and Then” section that featured four agencies that were pursuing digital mapping back in the ’80s,” Brush said.

NKAPC’s “then” map was featured in the 1987 conference map book and reprinted in the 25th edition alongside the “now” version of the same map. Each conference participant received one of these map books.

“We were in very good company,” Brush concluded.

LINK-GIS is a collaborative electronic mapping partnership managed by the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission on behalf of Kenton and Campbell County Fiscal Courts, the Kenton and Campbell County PVAs, the Northern Kentucky Water District, and Sanitation District 1 of Northern Kentucky.

“The site’s My Community viewer allows property owners to go online and see their voting precinct, zoning and school districts, in one simple table,” said Christy Powell, GISP, senior GIS specialist and co-programmer of the function. Additionally, the site shows restaurants, grocery stores, fire/police stations and other services in Kenton County. Staff plans to add information for Campbell and Pendleton Counties in the next phase of the project, which will be completed by next June.

Using technology similar to Google Maps, the LINK-GIS site uses the pushpin idea to point out the information searched for. “Instead of using general data, we’re using very specific, local information created over time by various local agencies,” Powell said.

In addition to My Community, the LINK-GIS website’s new, cutting edge Online Store with PayPal is the first of its kind in the region. “The store allows you to buy and download maps, digital data, aerial photography or LiDAR,” said Trisha Brush, GISP, NKAPC’s deputy director for GIS administration. Engineers, surveyors, and appraisers now have immediate access to data, any time of the day.

NKAPC partnered with two vendors, Stantec and Woolpert, to implement the website’s changes over the past year. The new site’s ArcGIS Server technology is cutting edge and is the current standard from the NKAPC’s software vendor, ESRI.

“We also have an improved content management system,” Powell said, “so we’re not having to do as many manual updates, which will be quicker and easier down the road.”

NKAPC GIS staff recently shared their website’s features with more than 30 people in the Cincinnati GIS Users Group, who are using similar technology for their agencies.

Staff has also been asked to speak at an upcoming statewide OGRIP (Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program) meeting and at the ESRI International User Conference in July.

“The way the site is arranged, the new map viewers and store all point to the fact that we’re working on our customer service via the internet,” Brush said. “Getting data and providing service was our goal and I believe we achieved it.”

Snyder, a principal GIS specialist at NKAPC, plans to share the topic and a hands-on demonstration with students in CINSAM’s Middle School Emerging Technologies Camp. The camp, facilitated by community professionals and NKU faculty members, is designed for gifted students as an enrichment camp in applied science, mathematics, and technology including engineering concepts.

While Snyder has been sharing the “What is GIS Technology” lesson to schools in the area for a while now, this is the first time NKAPC is participating in NKU’s summer camp program.

“We’re always looking for emerging technologies—what’s new and what’s happening,” said Thomas Brackman, physical science and pre-engineering recruiting director for NKU. “So, the GIS technology expertise NKAPC is bringing will be something new because we haven’t done anything like this. We’re looking forward to it.”

Snyder is also looking forward to working with this specific group of learners. “Students who have an aptitude for science, engineering, and math should be fun to work with. All of these kids should be interested.”

The 15 to 16 eager students expected to attend the emerging technologies camp will learn how GIS brings geography, mathematics, and IT together.

“I’ll talk about the idea of layers and data as well as attributes in a table being tied to geometry on a map,” Snyder said. “I’ll also show examples of applications for GIS locally that we’re doing to help them get their heads around it.”

The students will then use LINK-GIS data to do a problem-solving project as well as work with the LINK-GIS website.

In addition to GIS, other topics the camp covers are entomology, physics, and nanotechnology. The students will put together a quick presentation of what they learned to present to their parents at the end of the week.

“We just scratch the surface,” Brackman said. “But you can ignite that fire and expose students to different topics.”

“These monuments are an asset to the counties,” said Dennis Gordon, FAICP, NKAPC’s executive director. “These ordinances were adopted to protect the monuments and the public investments that made them possible.”

The ordinances were supported strongly by the local surveying and engineering community. These groups depend on the accuracy of the monuments as a basis for new land ownership records.

The 212 monuments set in pairs two miles apart across Kenton and Campbell counties represent exact locations on the earth using degrees of longitude and latitude. The monument locations provide highly-accurate data and serve as the basis for quality reports and CAD drawings from land surveyors.

Seven monuments have been destroyed or removed in the past ten years; it costs almost $4,000 each to repair or replace them. LINK-GIS funds replaced six of them before the ordinance was implemented. Now, if monuments are destroyed, the ordinance calls for those who disrupt the monument network to fund the repairs.

“SD1 staff are providing oversight for the ordinances through administration of their land disturbance permit process. If construction activities will disturb any of these monuments, its staff will alert applicants of the need to comply with the counties’ ordinances,” Gordon said.

“This will help immensely because the only way NKAPC would know if one was going to be disturbed is if it was self-reported. They’re helping us with this process,” he concluded.

More information on the ordinances and what they require is available from NKAPC’s GIS staff.