For many Kaua‘i county department heads and staffers, the acronym “GIS” is becoming the new buzzword for efficiency and productivity in government. Mayor Bryan J. Baptiste and other top county officials, who met with reporters in the mayor’s office at
For many Kaua‘i county department heads and staffers, the acronym “GIS” is becoming the new buzzword for efficiency and productivity in government.
Mayor Bryan J. Baptiste and other top county officials, who met with reporters in the mayor’s office at the Lihu‘e Civic Center Mo‘ikeha Building recently, said Geographic Information System technology provides data and imagery that will help leaders in county departments fight crime, determine how land should be zoned, streamline the permitting process for homebuilding, and collect, store and use information.
Baptiste said the project is part of his administration’s mission to improve and enhance delivery of public services. “By utilizing the technology available to us, we are better able to serve the people of Kaua‘i,” Baptiste said.
GIS is described by county officials as a computer-software system with which spatial information, which includes maps, can be “captured, stored, analyzed, displayed and retrieved.”
Harry Beatty, data-base administrator with the Kaua‘i County Information Technology division, said county leaders, for $5,000, purchase high-resolution imagery and geospatial information from officials at Digital Globe, based in Colorado.
The imagery and information are then integrated with an information system.
“They (Digital leaders) own a satellite system that provided us the highest resolution of satellite imagery outside of the military,” Beatty told The Garden Island.
The county’s outlay of $5,000 is a one-time expenditure, as part of other money leaders of state and federal agencies in Hawai‘i paid for the service for their respective projects, Beatty said.
Kaua‘i County officials anticipate buying the service for many more years, due to the need.
The use of GIS will become an integral part of police services, and will help save the county money in the long run, Baptiste and other county officials said.
Eric Knutzen, county IT communications and projects manner, said police investigators needing aerial photographs of crime areas previously relied on a helicopter company to take pictures.
Helicopter companies generally charge $700 for a session, Beatty said. “In the last month, we had nine areas that had to be photographed, and that would have come out to $6,300,” he said. “But we didn’t need to do this due to the availability of the system.”
At a crime scene, a KPD officer or investigator will contact officials in the county’s IT division, who will review the data base, and we will “zoom in” on the mapping of crime-scene sites, Beatty said.
“We can get in as close or as far as the Kaua‘i police wants,” Beatty said. The imagery will be put on a poster that KPD officers and investigators can use to combat crime in any area of the island, he said.
The use of the system in this way “is saving taxpayers thousands of dollars,” Knutzen said.
The technology also has benefited leaders in the Kaua‘i Fire Department, Baptiste said.
This summer, KFD interns Ryan Delos Reyes and Marc Shibata spent hours searching for information about KFD operations, including the response times, future housing and resort developments, estimated population increases, locations of fire hydrants, and other fire-department matters, Baptiste said.
The data was put in the GIS file system, enabling fire department officials to “run multiple scenarios” on where to put the next fire station on the island.
KFD officials have tossed around the idea of putting in another fire station in the Kawaihau District (Kapa‘a-Wailua), which is the largest population area on the island.
County officials and KFD Chief Robert “Bob” Westerman said the help of Delos Reyes and Shibata and the GIS system have been highly useful in helping county officials identify the next fire-station site.
Again, the use of the interns and the system have helped county leaders save a lot of money, officials said.
Had their services not been available, a consultant would have had to be hired to do the same work, but at a higher cost, officials said.
Kaua‘i Planning Department officials also have tapped into the high-tech tool, using an overlay feature of the GIS to determine how parcels of land should be zoned.
“About 20 percent of the island remains unzoned,” Knutzen said. “Planners are using GIS to assist them with making recommendations on zoning.”
The same system can be applied to countless county projects, officials said.
Beatty has been tasked with the responsibility of applying the GIS system island-wide, and is working diligently to bring more projects online, officials said.
“We’re working on streamlining the permitting process,” Beatty said.
That process is be done incrementally, and by the end of the year, folks will be able to log on to a county Web site and obtain information on their homebuilding project, he said.
The information will help homeowners and builders make the best use of their building funds and resources, he explained.
Future enhancements to the permitting process will be announced as they come online, Beatty said.
Planned down the road is a project that will allow county employees in all departments to access the GIS, allowing for a sharing of information that will lead to better collaboration and coordination among all county services, officials said.
County workers doing field work also will be in touch with the latest high-technology tools.
When doing field work, a county staffer, in the future, will be able to put data in a mobile tablet, and retrieve it when they return to their offices, officials said.
“The sky’s the limit when it comes to all the different ways the county can utilize GIS,” said Mike Tresler, the director of the county’s Department of Finance.
County officials implemented a digital-mapping system 1 and 1/2 years ago, to improve the way officials in county departments operate.
In a recent letter to members of the Kaua‘i County Council, Tresler described how the system operators have made “great strides” since that time, and praised the cooperation the council members and administration officials have shown in developing a system that “directly benefits our island.”
