Digital mapping to help towns manage growth

Project will also aid in delivering emergency services

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — The county geographic information system, GIS, is finally up and running, a least for the Village of Liberty. Paul Burckard, the director of Real Property Tax Services, told lawmakers on Thursday, January 19 that the village was the first of the county’s 21 municipalities to be entered into the GIS, and county employees can access all the digitized tax maps for the village.

By the end of the year, Burckard hopes to have digitized tax parcel maps in the county database for most of the towns and villages in the county.

Planning commissioner Dr. William Pammer explained the benefits. “The difference between the digitized tax parcels and the old parcels is that the new parcels are what we call intelligent: they allow us to add data to it.”

Pammer said that when the system is fully up and running, it will help emergency responders. The GIS database will “have a detailed inventory of infrastructure in the county for emergency management purposes. If we had to dispatch emergency vehicles to an area, we could tell them exactly where the emergencies are” with an error range of about two to five feet.

Pammer said the technology would also help manage growth. “The digitized parcels will allow us to do projections of development patterns in towns and villages. And that is going to play a major roll in the technical assistance that we’re providing right now, to help towns understand the decisions that they’re making in terms of subdivision approval and determining where development is occurring. And now that the Village of Liberty is online, we can do incredible amounts of analysis on that.”

In a related development, county legislators voted to move forward with the adoption of a technical assistance policy for the planning department. The new policy allows the department to accept payment for services such as comprehensive plan review. Any services would be offered to municipalities on a strictly voluntary basis.

One planning board member from Lumberland, however, was opposed to the proposed resolution because it did not mention or encourage private planning consultants. Van Krzywicki, who is also a principal in the Fish Cabin Preserve, said he spoke to a private planner about the matter. “She raised some concerns about creativity,” he said, “whether the county planning department is equivalent to a private planner in terms of creativity. And she also raised concerns about charisma, for lack of a better word, whether the county planning department is equivalent to private planners.”

Rodney Gaebel responded that any town would be free to hire any planner it chooses. He added, “I do take a little offense at the creativity issue and some of those comments because I think the people in our planning department could probably work for those consultants, and maybe even open their own consulting firms.”

Lumberland supervisor John LiGreci was at the meeting in his capacity as chairman of the Association of Supervisors. He supported the planning board’s proposal without reservation. “Let me put it this way. In the Town of Lumberland we had a proposed fee of $100,000 to do our master plan. Using the county will probably cost us about $10,000.”

The full board is scheduled to vote on the resolution on Thursday, January 26.