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ST. GEORGE — The Community Development Office within the Utah Department of Workforce Services has announced a new Graphic Information System (GIS) guide targeting cities and towns to help them better manage their municipal assets.
The guide is designed as a framework to gather and analyze geographic data that rural towns, as well as larger cities such as St. George, can use as a more effective way to manage their tangible assets, communicate and collaborate across geographic barriers, identify patterns found in the information collected, and combine a variety of geographic data in a variety of different 21st-century ways.
The guide: "GIS Applications in Municipal Government: Strategies for Small Towns" is written especially for Utah's rural towns, but can be scaled up to assist larger cities, said Community Development Office director Keith Heaton.
"GIS technology is an accessible, (affordable) way for small towns to create more advanced management and planning tools," Heaton said. "However, smaller municipalities may not know that this is something that their staff can learn to use. They don't have to hire an expensive outside firm to do it."
"Our office was formed about six years ago to help rural communities with their planning needs," Heaton said. "We do a number of things including providing tools, guides, and resources for towns that don't have the staff and capacity to do these types of things on their own."
Read the full story at St. George News.
