By: Rex Thaxton, Vice President, Mountain CAD
Corporation
A lot of people talk about efficient government. In Cabell County, WV they are practicing it through using a Web based Geographic Information System (GIS). The system, housed at the county courthouse in Huntington, WV, allows Internet users to access residential and commercial real estate property information, view and print tax parcel maps, determine if properties reside in a flood plain, and locate undeveloped properties. The site is powered by software developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (ESRI), of Redlands, CA and Mountain CAD Corp. of South Charleston, WV “It is great way to provide information to Realtor’s, Appraiser’s, Lawyers and all of the citizens of the county”, remarked, Ottie Adkins, Assessor of Cabell County. “Also our staff is much more efficient due to a decrease in foot traffic and telephone calls, Adkins continued. I estimate we save at least six man hours per day due to the use of this web site”.
The system has been up and running for two years and people have really taken notice. Greg Miller, President of the Huntington Board
of Realtors commented, “Any Realtor that needed to do any kind of property research used to have to drive down to the courthouse and spend hours sifting through documents. Through using the Cabell County Web Site that task has now been reduced to minutes”. After recent flooding in the area many others are also taking notice of the site. Now anyone can very easily log onto the system to determine if the property they own or are thinking about buying resides in a flood plain. Had property owners and bankers used the site it would have saved them thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache. Currently the county supplies Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) Q3 data. They are in the process of adding Digital Federal Insurance Rate Mapping that will give the user even more accuracy in determining flood possibility.
Seven years ago the Cabell County Assessor’s office began building their in house GIS. They contacted Mountain CAD Corporation, an ESRI Business Partner,
located in South Charleston, WV to help them come up with a plan. After assessing the different individual needs, budgetary constraints, staff skill levels, and existing data Mountain CAD proposed that the county first convert their existing
digital data into Autodesk Map, an Autodesk, Inc. software. Jerry Workman, PE and President of Mountain CAD wrote a custom program to facilitate the data transfer.
Once the data resided correctly in Autodesk Map the county then had a way to better maintain the individual tax maps and a way to begin moving data into the world of GIS.
The next step was to create a seamless countywide map and move this map data into ArcView, an ESRI, Inc software. JD Adkins, the GIS Coordinator and Deputy Assessor was responsible for this task as well as the day-to-day running of the entire system. JD added the additional mapping layers such as the FEMA Q3 flood mapping. Also, at this time Mountain CAD was hired by the WV Department of Tax and Revenue to link tax parcels to the new Integrated Assessment System (IAS) database. Adkins and Workman sat down and came up with the idea for the IAS Portal. The Portal is now the front-end search engine for all property lookups. It is a product that was written to specifically address the needs of a county assessor office and the citizens of a county. The IAS Portal also allows the county staff to produce reports on properties and do property lookups very easily. Cabell County then purchased ESRI’s ArcIMS
software, which is the map display component of the web site. Here again Adkins and Workman collaborated in getting the site functional. “It is a great example of a partnership between customer and vendor”, remarked Workman
“We know that our site is not unique”, said JD Adkins. “But we were the first county in WV to provide this type of information to our citizens. Before we went on line our staff would spend countless hours helping people do property research. As more people use the site our staff is now having the time to do things better and faster. We did not fully realize the impact it was having on our community until the site was down one day. The phones simply rang off the hook.”
For more information on the Cabell County Web Site and Cabell County GIS efforts please contact Rex Thaxton with Mountain CAD Corp. or JD Adkins with the Cabell County Assessor’s Office. Rex can be reached at 304-744-7911 or rex@mtncad.com. JD can be reached at 04-526-9759 or jd@cabellassessor.com. Please visit the Cabell County Assessors site at www.cabellassessor.com
|
