The public servants within municipal government face many challenges in today’s volatile economy. However, despite the budget constraints forced on them by tax revenue shortfalls, they must find a way to accomplish four main goals: manage citizen services, maintain public safety, increase efficiencies, and adhere to a growing number of regulatory requirements. Faced with staff layoffs and attrition, government leaders will need to turn to technology in order to continue to provide their constituents with these services.

Managing Citizen Services
Geospatial technology has been pushed to new limits as elected officials strive to make doing business with the city quicker and more convenient. The result is an increasing number of Internet mapping sites and e-government applications.

Internet mapping sites have served to give constituents access to property and tax records, and to fund that service by charging title companies and real estate companies fees for their use. Many smaller counties cannot afford the expense of purchasing and setting up an Internet mapping system, but can achieve the same results by signing on with a company such as eMapping Solutions to host and maintain their site.

Many communities are discovering unique ways to expand what citizen’s get from these Internet sites. Could the Internet mapping site be used by citizens to report non-emergency maintenance for problems with sidewalks, potholes in roads, downed signs, or ailing city trees? There are countless possibilities, and eMapping Solutions can help you get there.

Maintain Public Safety
In the wake of the September 11th tragedy, local governments are scrambling to put together emergency response plans. In order for any of those plans to work, it will be necessary to have access to maps and intelligent mapping tools.

There are countless other public safety concerns that can be managed more efficiently with geospatial data: tracking sex offenders and ensuring that they reside a safe distance from schools, parks and daycare centers; locating catch basins with standing water and other habitats for mosquito breeding that need to be sprayed to control the spread of West Nile disease; and mapping crimes to keep neighborhoods informed of potential risks.

Increase Efficiencies
The biggest push in the GIS community over recent years, is the move to a RDBMS which means storing all graphic and attribute data in a Relational Database. This eliminates the duplication of effort in data entry and data maintenance. This also ensures that every person in the organization is accessing the most recent data, and not providing archaic information to field personnel or the public.

Adhere to Regulatory Requirements
The regulatory requirement that is receiving the most attention in the GIS world is GASB 34. GASB Statement 34 changes the way local governments present financial information to the media, creditors, bond raters, citizens and elected officials. The idea is that government will make better decisions when it includes assets and liabilities on its balance sheet.

GASB 34 requires local governments (also including special districts like school districts, water districts, redevelopment) to include information about their public infrastructure assets (such as bridges, roads, storm sewers, etc.), as well as information about how they are maintained. It also requires a change to accrual accounting.

Due dates for compliance have been separated into three tiers based on the city’s budget. The largest cities ($100 million and above) and the medium cities ($10 million - $100 million) have already seen the compliance deadline pass, but the small cities with of budget of $10 million or less have a deadline for compliance in 2004.

There is no way to enforce these deadlines, however, a city will receive a lower bond rating if they do not conform to GASB 34 standards. When there is a large capital project planned, a city must apply for a bond in order to borrow money. Standards & Poors and Moodys will rate the risk of that bond being paid back, and the timeliness of payments. There is a much higher rating assessed to those municipalities that have achieved GASB 34 compliance.

Many communities are in the process of, or planning phases of collecting data on their infrastructure features (sewers, roads, sidewalks, street light & conduit, etc.) with GPS systems. From these coordinate points, the next logical step is to create an intelligent network. These graphics can then be linked to maintenance databases or asset management systems to make not only planning improvements more efficient, but also allow the municipality to gain access to more federal funding for improvements because they are making more intelligent estimates on maintenance activity.