Sherburne County is developing a plan to implement its Geographic Information System (GIS) into more and more departments throughout the county.

At a county board workshop in August, Public Works Director Andrew Witter and GIS Coordinator Brett Forbes outlined the plan for the commissioners.

“We thought it would be good to put together a three-year strategic plan - what our strengths are, what are weaknesses are and where we’re going,” said Witter. “We really didn’t want to extend it out much further than three years at this point. It’s a quickly evolving market. There’s probably going to be new technology and new data and new types of GIS applications that are not available now.”

GIS is a framework for gathering, managing, and analyzing data. It analyzes spatial location and organizes layers of information into visualizations using maps and 3D scenes. GIS reveals deeper insights into data, such as patterns, relationships, and situations -helping users make better informed decisions. The county’s maps have layers of information that allows different viewers to not only pinpoint a location, but find other important information.

Since the creation of the GIS Division in Public Works in 1998, Public Works has succeeded in creating, developing and growing the county’s GIS infrastructure and has succeeded in supporting the needs of users within the county.  

GIS currently plays a major role in four county departments: Public Works, Planning & Zoning, Assessor and Administration. It is instrumental in the everyday operations of each department for things like roads and address points for emergency management; access permits; land use maps; parcel assessments; surveying; voting locations and census updates.

Although the county’s GIS has become increasingly useful, demand for GIS services and mapping requests increases, and new methods need to be developed to meet the expanded needs.

The purpose of the three-year GIS strategic plan is establish a mutual framework for county departments and promote GIS programs and initiatives.

Forbes said one of the goals is to work more with cities and townships to gather and share their information. He said currently GIS relies on other  county departments to relay their department data. Under the strategic plan, GIS will take the initiative to get information and set policies that will improve services internally and for all stakeholders.

Some of the recently completed projects include a Right-of-way program where applicants can view potential issues on a map and mitigate them during the initial application, reducing time spent on revisions; the Report a Concern program where the general public can make a report for things like potholes, accidents and the location of roadkill; the Daycare Finder, which allows users to search for licensed daycares.

Forbes said there are 18 other GIS projects in progress or planned, which will take approximately 3,500 hours to complete.

Witter said the three-year strategic plan is something completely new, and will evolve over time.

“In our research about who else has done something like this, we had a very difficult time finding any public GIS plans,” he said, “even nationwide.”