Garfield County making info from assessor available online

GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colorado — Garfield County is building a new Internet-based service that will allow web surfers to pull up information like aerial photos and property information from the county’s assessor database.

The new system would also allow internal users to access Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission wells and permit data, along with information about pipeline and temporary housing locations. If there is an interest, the oil and gas data could be made available to all users on the Internet, according to a memo by Robert Hykys, the geographic information systems (GIS) analyst lead for Garfield County’s IT Department.

The proposed system would be a cluster of five servers that would provide “24/7” connectivity to the Internet, processing for Internet mapping users and processing for internal users. There would be another service hosting the “live” GIS data for all users.

The Garfield County commissioners have approved a contract not to exceed $84,400 for hardware for the project and another contract not to exceed $50,000 for current and future consultation costs for the project.

The proposed service would create Garfield County’s first real presence on the Internet. The county’s main website now is held on a server in California, according to Hykys’ memo.

Once the system is established, future projects could include a county planning site where current zoning and comprehensive map information can be “queried.” The system could also have a flood plain site, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer flood plain mapping can be examined in relation to individual parcels, Hykys wrote in his memo.

“While these are all examples of only the GIS capabilities of the (proposed system), the infrastructure itself will support any web application the county chooses to provide,” Hykys wrote.

Work on the project began in 2006. In October 2007 the county IT department contracted for help to evaluate its objectives and propose a system design solution, along with work to help the department implement that design.