Applications in GIS, Lab 8: GIS in Local Government

This week in lab we learned about how GIS is used in local governments.  In this instance, we focused on land appraisals and how your local county appraisers office uses GIS.  The environment impact of a fly-in community needed to be assessed via the parcels surrounding this selected parcel.  First, we used the Marion County Appraisers Office website to learn about the selected parcel (Mr. Zuko's) and the surrounding area.  This is a screen shot of the image from that website.  You can see there is a jet parked in the driveway....

Aerial image of Mr. Zuko's parcel

Secondly, we made a Environmental Impact Assessment parcel basemap.  Here you can see Mr. Zuko's parcel and the surrounding adjacent parcels that may be impacted.  We used a table to identify each parcel by map key number, parcel ID number, zoning type, owner, acreage and address.  Each parcel is labeled 1-9 and corresponds in the table.  

EIA parcel basemap surrounding Mr. Zuko's parcel.

We also utilized Data Driven Pages which allowed a map book to be created.  Adding a grid to the adjacent parcels let us create a locator map.  We could stay zoomed in to 1:2400 of each grid and while only that data frame changed.  It saves a lot of time and effort if something minor needed to be changed on one map - this way you wouldn't have to go through all 12 maps.

Our final map was part of a different scenario.  The Gulf County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) wants to build a new extension office and needs to find out some locations that are possible.  The criteria were: 

1. Must be county owned

2. 20 Acres of larger

3. Vacant land

Using various selection by location and attributes searches we were able to narrow it down to two possible parcels that meet the above criteria.  Below, you can see aerial maps with the two parcels selected in red and blue.  The two data frames on the bottom allow close-up views of each parcel including the total acreage.