GIS Steering Committee

“Where People Count” MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 1000 Civic Center Drive, Niles, Illinois 60714 Telephone (847) 588-8000 Fax (847) 588-8050 GIS Steering Committee Meeting December 2, 2010 Co-Chairs: Andrew Przybylo – Trustee George Van Geem – Village Manager Persons in attendance: Robert Callero Mayor Steve Cusick MIS Dept. Mousa Nazzal Engineering Dept. Bill Shaw MIS Dept. George Van Geem Village Manager Andrew Vitale MIS Dept. Rich Wlodarski Community Development Dept. The meeting was called to order at 8:05 a.m. Agenda Item #1 – Approval of Minutes The minutes of the September 29, 2010 meeting were approved. Agenda Item #2 – Old Business – Project Updates Digital Data Submission Policy A.Vitale reported that he is waiting to hear about the two potential projects to test our digital data submission policy. It probably won’t be until January or February. We’re just about set to hand it off. Water & Sewer Mapping Update A.Vitale stated that he has spent a lot of time on water and sewer mapping updates. He hasn’t gotten a lot of sheets back from Tom’s (Polcyn) group. The water group requested some extensive alterations to the atlases. Because we were going through those extensive changes, we decided to do some renumbering and realigning of our atlas sheets to make them more logical and to make the atlas production process simpler. It took up the lion’s share of his time over the last month and a half, but he now has all of the 11 x 17 field atlases ready to go. He has prepared one set of office size for Community Development, one set for Engineering, and will make an additional set for Engineering’s office setting. What took a lot of time was that water and sewer crews have a lot of detailed, inset areas that they needed more specific information for, so he had to go through and identify where they were and also compare insets at the back of the maps. He had to match up numbers of the insets and numbers in the back and line up the page numbers. The Water Department has approved them; atlas production has begun. Atlas Training B.Shaw reported that he is almost done with the revised curriculum for the Atlas training and asked permission to use George Van Geem’s address for demonstration purposes. G.Van Geem said yes. We have added the “people” section and have tested everything we can. We are a little behind in updating political information, but once we get that done, Cathy Spadoni will begin scheduling classes. We will try to have our first class in December. A training session will be approximately 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours. Mayor Callero said to try to cut it to 1-1/2 hours. He added that the class should instruct on what to get into and how to get into it, but shouldn’t demonstrate. B. Shaw will focus on property information, which is the area that most people – by a 3 to 1 margin – focus on over mapping. Mayor Callero noted that written material is very important because that’s what the employee will go back to. Written material is equally as important as verbal training. B.Shaw will create a manual that will correlate with the training. He will teach the classes, with Andrew Vitale assisting him. Mayor Callero said there are two issues: training and the sales pitch. We must have a class for all trustees. The approach should be as follows: “Here’s my schedule of classes. The mayor would like you to attend one of them.” B. Shaw also needs to contact the department heads. At the department head meeting in two weeks, he will ask them where they would like their training. It was noted that Public Services personnel are more likely to be available when the weather forecast calls for no snow. Maintenance Management System (MMS) A.Vitale reported that Tim Spadoni has been working on MMS. B. Shaw added that we are doing the first round of quality control, checking all the functions and making sure it is intuitive for the users. We should be finished with that next week. In mid-December to early January, we will roll it out to a handful of people at Public Services for testing. We hope to be able to go live with service requests in late January, early February. While that is going on, work orders will be developed. It was built based on existing procedures and won’t be a huge deviation from what people are used to. Agenda Item #3 – New Business GIS Development Projects o Cook County Street / Address Standardization Project – A.Vitale got a call from Cook County. They are going through an address standardization project for all streets and addresses throughout the county. This is for emergency and disaster planning. They are asking for our street information and the address point file. 2  Committee members present approved fulfilling the request as this is public information. A.Vitale will send it to them by the end of the day. o IMS Mapping Software Replacement – A.Vitale reported that we have been experiencing some reliability and availability problems with the software that does the mapping within our Atlas application. As discussed previously, the software has been retired by ESRI and is no longer supported. We will have to replace it sooner rather than later, as highlighted by the recent problems. He has learned a little about the functionalities of its replacement and how it would work within our existing framework. We have come to the conclusion that it will take a lot of effort on our part, and possibly some consulting to get a lot of the functionality within our mapping applications to port over correctly. There is money in the budget for professional services, which leads us to the next point. o Sewer Infrastructure Data Capture – A.Vitale continued that that money was originally earmarked for the completion of the sewer data information capture and particularly the invert elevations for the Stormwater Commission. Hey & Associates has finished their portion of data gathering and he is questioning if it is worth it to spend the money to gather all inverts on every sewer structure if it’s not needed for the sewer commission’s work in light of the fact that our mapping software is deficient. G. Van Geem asked how much money we are talking about for each of these two issues. A.Vitale is not certain because he doesn’t know how many structures to capture if we chose to go in that direction or how many consulting dollars we’ll need to port over our applications completely. B. Shaw said that we budgeted $75,000 for this and we offered it to the Stormwater Committee if they needed it, but it doesn’t look as if it has been allocated for anything. He and Andrew are trying to determine if that money is still available for us. If so, we would like to pursue one of these two things depending on the opinion of this committee and the Stormwater Committee. A. Vitale said that Steve Vinezeano can tell him to wait and hold the money but he doesn’t want to hold the money until the end of March when it will be gone. M. Nazzal suggested that Andrew ask Steve to hold the money until we see how many inverts Hey engineers have captured so far. A. Vitale had hoped to get the answer back in August. M. Nazzal continued that it is important information to have and should be a complete as possible, but gathering it is a long and expensive process. He suggested that we could do one area at a time instead of doing the entire Village at once. A.Vitale does not know if getting all that information is going to be more valuable in the long run as opposed to replacing the mapping software, given some of the reliability issues. Mayor Callero asked why this is happening. No one knows. The new product is from the same company, and A.Vitale has heard nothing negative regarding its reliability. It has been out, in its current form, for three or four years. We own the software; the expense comes from the transition, which would be too time-consuming for the MIS staff to do. B. Shaw asked the Steering Committee to consider using some of that money to expedite the process, possibly 3  bring in some help. Mayor Callero advised that we first need to find out how much it will cost - $5,000 or $50,000 of the $75,000. B. Shaw estimates that it would be $20,000 or less. Mayor Callero said to get more definite figures and give them to George. Mayor Callero then asked M. Nazzal and A.Vitale to talk to the engineers as to when we would need the additional data capturing for the inverts, if we still need it, and how important it is. Put it in a short memo and give it to George. G. Van Geem asked if this committee still thinks it is important to get the inverts for every sewer structure in town. M. Nazzal responded that for design it is very important. G. Van Geem added that just because the Stormwater Committee focused on six sub areas of town doesn’t mean that those are the only six that are important. B.Shaw asked how far the $75,000 would get us in collecting the rest of the inverts. A.Vitale responded that they charged us a little over $3 to get the X, Y and Z. He would guess that they would charge us between $6 and $12 per point because they will spend more time on each structure. To collect the X, Y and Z it cost us over $80,000, so this will likely be more expensive. It may be less if they do it in the winter, which would put it in this year’s budget. S. Cusick commented that we don’t have to do the entire Village at once. We should find out what it will cost to replace IMS, and then see what is left over to pay for the invert capture and do the most important ones first. Mayor Callero added that if the project runs from January to August, the project could be split – half in this year’s budget, half in next year’s budget. We need more information before we decide. Agenda Item #4 – Departmental Projects Sign Inventory A.Vitale reported that he and Bob Pilat have been working on the sign inventory, determining what fields Bob would like to see in the database. Bob will take the list and create a form for his field crews to use. No time frame has been discussed. B.Shaw commented that Scott Jochim told him, “We really need to get a sign inventory. I need to get it done in a hurry.” B. Shaw told him to come to the GIS meeting, as it is the GIS Department that should be managing, supporting and storing this information. All the sign information has to end up in GIS. It has to be a coordinated effort. G. Van Geem suggested that we address this problem in the next couple of weeks. Federal guidelines are mandating that we do this by 2014 and we can’t wait until 2013 to get started. We’ll set a meeting that will be convenient for Bob Pilat to attend and get this going next week. This is definitely a GIS issue. We’re not going to spend all that money on a data collection system and have him do it somewhere else. Mayor Callero directed Andrew to call a meeting to discuss the sign inventory. It should include Andrew Vitale, Bill Shaw, Steve Cusick, George Van Geem, and the appropriate person(s) from 4 Public Services. A. Vitale said he would contact Bob Pilat and set up a meeting within the next two weeks. Hydrant Painting A.Vitale reported that Fire Chief Barry Mueller never got back to him regarding how he wanted to proceed. Because Barry has since retired, he doesn’t know who to contact at the Fire Department. Steve Borkowski is now the contact person. A. Vitale will contact Steve and Scott Jochim and see what they want to do. The springtime is probably the best time to re-do any hydrant painting. He will coordinate with them.
G. Van Geem asked if there will ever be a time when the users can be more pro-active in getting whatever data they think is important into the system. When we were putting this together, it was sold as a very broad and comprehensive data gathering system. Will a user ever be able to enter data, or will he have to go through the MIS Department? A.Vitale responded that a lot would depend on the kind of information you want to put in. There are a lot of things relating to individual addresses and parcels that he can’t just put in because so many other departments and systems touch those kinds of databases. He has to be careful about what gets in and what doesn’t. S. Cusick added that it will be Andrew who will have to create the place for the data, but there is no reason that we can’t distribute the maintenance of the data into the individual user’s hands in the future. Mayor Callero observed that once we get further in and get the training, we can then go out to all the department heads. If they want something specific in, it goes back to George who will determine if it is acceptable. A. Vitale pointed out that it should go through the GIS Steering Committee because it is the responsibility of this committee, in part, to set policy. Mayor Callero agreed. B.Shaw stated that particular information that a user wants to keep track of doesn’t have to be part of a fancy, automated system. It could simply be on a spreadsheet. The MIS Department is available to work with users to provide them with what they need in its most efficient and useful format.
M. Nazzal commented that he uses and relies on Atlas a lot, but it is very slow. And the more information we add, the slower it gets. He asked if anything can be done to make it faster. S. Cusick responded that that is part of what the new IMS mapping software replacement will fix. A.Vitale added yes, it will provide not only reliability but improved speed and performance as well. Agenda Item #5 – Schedule the Next Meeting (recommended date: January 27, 2011) The next meeting will be Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 8:00 a.m. in the 2nd floor main conference room 218. The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 a.m. 5 Steering Committee Members Andrew Przybylo Trustee atp@vniles.com George Van Geem Administration gvg@vniles.com 847-588-8002 Bill Shaw MIS wfs@vniles.com 847-588-8015 Andrew Vitale MIS ajv@vniles.com 847-588-8022 Steve Cusick MIS src@vniles.com 847-588-8018 Moses Nazzal Engineering mhn@vniles.com 847-588-7924 Scott Jochim Public Services snj@vniles.com 847-588-7901 Bob Pilat Public Services rmp@vniles.com 847-588-7926 Chuck Ostman Community Development cfo@vniles.com 847-588-8041 Rich Wlordarski Community Development rjw@vniles.com 847-588-8085 6