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Politics & Government

GIS Rangers Map Things for Fridley, from Tornadoes to Trees

The company made the map that tracked city's storm damage.

After the May 22 tornado cut a north-to-northwest path through Fridley, city officials put cutting-edge, digital technology to work to help assess the damage.

The city used the technology—called Geographic Information Systems (GIS),  provided by Roseville-based GIS Rangers LLC—to create a tornado-damage map. GIS Rangers has also been helping Fridley's engineering department track damaged trees.

GIS technology has been around for decades, but its capabilities have grown steadily due to advances in computing power, GPS software and hand-held devices. A geographic information system (GIS) combines the use of software, hardware and location-linked data to analyze, interpret and display relationships and patterns.

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GIS Rangers has been providing the technology under contract to Fridley for about the past decade, according to City Manager Bill Burns. The city shares the cost of GIS Rangers' services under an arrangement with two other metro suburbs: Columbia Heights and Andover.

A GIS employee staffs a desk in the Fridley city engineering department three days per week.

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“It's been a good program for us,” Burns says. “We used to have our own GIS staff, but it's more efficient to contract it out as a joint venture with the two other cities.”

Modern GIS technologies use digital information created by various methods. The most common method of data creation is digitization, in which a hard-copy map or survey plan is transferred into a digital medium with a computer-aided design (CAD) program and geo-referencing.

Any variable that can be located spatially (in space)—and increasingly also temporally (in time)—can be referenced using a GIS. These GIS coordinates may represent other systems of temporo-spatial (time and space) reference—for example, highway mile markers, surveyor benchmarks, building addresses or street intersections.

According to , using GIS “you can map locations, map quantities, map densities and more. But GIS does more than create a map; it can capture, manage, analyze, and display any form of geographically-referenced information.”

Fridley Public Works Director Jim Kosluchar said GIS is useful not only for storms or other emergency situations but also for more routine matters: GIS Rangers has helped the city with “all kinds of infrastructure and other mapping—zoning maps, maps of city property, election maps.

“They made us a digital map of all of the parcels in the city," he said. "For example, if there is a special-use hearing or a hearing for a variance, we have to notify all of the property owners within a certain distance. It's very simple to put in a query (saying), 'Give me a map of all properties within 300 feet of a certain location.' It's much faster and easier than doing it by hand on a (paper) map.”

GIS can display all kinds of attributes. "It's also useful for routine infrastructure maintenance," Kosluchar said. “I can say, 'Show us all the sewer mains that have been lined within the past 20 years,' and it will filter the results and display them.”

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