By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@thecitizennews.com

Fayette County took another step into the 21st Century last week, with plans for similar steps over the next five years.

Geographic Information System technology will cost the county about $645,723 over five years if all of the elements of that technology recommended by county staff are approved. The county has previously allocated an additional $385,000 to have consultants Keck and Wood help put the new system in place.

Better, more accurate, more useful maps for a variety of purposes will be the result.

“Now you take a paper flood plain map, make a clear copy of it and put it over a topo map and spread it out on a table,” said David Borkowski, acting county engineer and chairman of the staff committee working on GIS. “With GIS you can do it all in the computer. You can overlay all kinds of different things without having to look at 10 or 15 paper maps.

“And it's an intelligent map, too. You can ask it questions. You can look at a piece of property and ask, `How far away from the flood plain is it?' Or you can tell it to list all the property within 100 feet of the landfill that's worth more than $100,000,” Borkowski said.

For now, county commissioners have approved spending $57,641 to “convert the tax digest from a manually prepared paper product to an interactive digital product.”

Along with a request for the funding for the tax office, Borkowski presented commissioners with a five-year plan for computer upgrades and equipment purchases that will make a variety of detailed maps available in several county departments.

How the technology is used depends upon the needs of a particular department. “The tax assessors need digital versions of the tax maps, engineering is concerned about flood plains and things like that, elections wants the election districts,” said Borkowski.

Eventually the property tax information and other GIS maps will be available to the public electronically, said Borkowski, with public access terminals available in the pertinent departments.

The five-year plan is subject to annual budget review. Commissioners can implement any or all of the improvements as they see fit.

Included in the plan is money for hiring a coordinator to run the GIS program in 2003, but depending upon how the purchases develop, that person may not be needed until a year or two after that, said Borkowski.

Commissioners, who earlier had complained that every few months a new GIS spending request was being presented with no long-term idea where those expenditures were leading, expressed delight at having the five-year plan presented all at once.

“Something we've been looking for is to have a plan presented to us that is not piecemeal,” said commission Chairman Harold Bost. “I'm very pleased and appreciative.”