Los Angeles County

When your department is charged with performing all land use planning functions for Los Angeles County, GIS is going to play a vital role in your day-to-day operations. The Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning provides services including long range planning, environmental review, and code enforcement for over one million people living in the more than 2,600 square miles of unincorporated Los Angeles County.

Nick Franchino, GIS Manager for Regional Planning, and his team manage over 350 gigabytes of GIS data and over one terabyte of Pictometry oblique images. This data is distributed in five key web-based GIS applications available to Regional Planning staff, other County departments and the public.

Initially, delivering data to the right people was Franchino’s chief concern, who notes, "We used to have one ArcIMS application in-house; and it worked fine for most folks but we were starting to have difficulties maintaining and updating the site."

Recognizing a more advanced foundation was required to satisfy their needs, Regional Planning adopted Geocortex IMF to power their Enterprise GIS. They subsequently created specialized sites to solve problems that had plagued Regional Planning Staff.

Regional Planning’s most complex application, called ‘Z-NET’, includes a zoning administration database and all scanned and georeferenced zone change ordinances. Before the introduction of ‘Z-NET’, Regional Planning staff looking for zone change maps had to sift through hardcopy files. Sometimes the files were incomplete or even missing. Now finding a zoning change map only involves a simple zoom to the area of interest and turning on the zone change layer. A boundary of all zone change maps in the extent appears with links to scanned files. Parcel and other layers can be overlaid to provide additional insight.

In addition to ‘Z-NET’, four other ArcIMS applications are helping Regional Planning staff work more efficiently. ‘E-NET’ uses environmental datasets for Impact Analysis and Zoning Permits. ‘SUB-NET’ provides detailed project information, as well as access to scanned tract and parcel map images.

Another ArcIMS application called ‘GIS-NET’ is available in both intranet and Internet versions. The Internet version provides access to zoning and land use policy layers, a service that wasn’t previously available to the public. The public version went live in June 2006, and the Department believes the site will help reduce the number of calls to Regional Planning staff related to zoning and land use policy and may even reduce the number of visits to Regional Planning headquarters.

The internal ‘GIS-NET’ site is the flagship application for the Department and includes advanced functionality including markup tools, and links to Pictometry’s oblique digital imagery. ‘GIS-NET’ will soon be available to several other County departments including the Assessor, CIO, CAO and Department of Public Works.

Looking ahead, Regional Planning GIS staff are designing a number of new applications that will include linking to the Department’s permitting system as well as live GPS tracking of mobile devices. Additionally, advanced reporting will be added to some existing sites and there are plans to integrate CyberCity 3D terrain views.

By providing easy access to Enterprise GIS data, Regional Planning staff are more efficient and better equipped to handle their day-to-day jobs. Franchino observes, "We are spending less time updating and maintaining desktop applications while providing better access to GIS data.

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