Parcel Mapping Forum

I first attended the session from 12:45 to 1:45pm where I first learned about the work Jason Poser and Frank Conkling did on ‘Transforming a County Land Information Program – Starting with the Parcel Fabric’ for Buffalo County. I have heard of parcel mapping before but I never knew quite what it meant so it was nice to hear about a real world project involving parcel mapping. The two men had originally used CAD for parcel mapping and they worked with employees that were not well trained and they did not receive enough funding, both of which made their job very difficult to do mapping. They realized that they could not continue to use CAD and if they were to continue using CAD, they would continue to run into a large number of problems. So then they decided to switch over to parcel fabric. They were able to map parcels in parcel fabric without the need of a PLSS, which could allow for easy property changes. Over the course of eight years using CAD they were only able to map about 40% of the county but by using parcel fabric for just a few months, they mapped roughly 30%. Parcel fabric allows one to create a polygon and to keep the metadata associated with that parcel, then once can accurately move that parcel to an accurate location at the end, which was interesting to learn. Using parcel fabric for this project is a pretty manual process with unjoining and moving parcels without much math involved (i.e. RMSE), and they have an open data policy!!

I then learned about a project that involved mapping or monumenting corners. They have their corners monumented with the help of tie sheets for Barron County and are in the process of restoring all of the corners of Barron County. I didn’t quite learn what corners are used for or how they are important, but it did seem rather interesting and a really tedious process. The speaker talked about how many of the people he works with have been there for a while and that there are very few turnovers, which would be nice because everybody would be well educated and I bet there would be some nice chemistry in place to help complete tasks more easily. It was interesting to see that many monuments have been trees in the past and have been replaced by ‘markers’ through the years. Many of these markers have been buried under roads which I never would have guessed. He made it a point to build and keep good relations with law officers and the community, because they can either help with the project or cause a lot of pain and headache if you do not have a good relationship with them. It is also important to keep your firmware up to date which makes sense, but I probably would not have thought about that on my own. And he also made it a point to note that redundancy is important!!!

Next, Brett Budrow talked about the PLSS and Parcels of St. Croix County. He used a multi-purpose cadastic with the help of PLSS and other means, which helped to map the parcels. He mentioned that they used a bounty system, which I have never heard about until that presentation. It was interesting to learn that the original survey was in 1847-1849 and they still go back to those surveys and have built upon those surveys over the years, but the first full-time surveyor was only hired in 1989. Again, he used tie sheets for monumentation just like the first speakers and they tied PLSS with parcel mapping in the late 90’s. He had to work with surveys that lacked geodetic control so his first step was to geodetically ‘fix’ the section and quarter-quarter section corners. The department had a parcel conversion project in 2001 and continual maintenance/spatial improvement is needed for the tax parcels, so funding is very important for a project like this.

The last section of the forum involved a discussion about various aspects of parcel mapping. It was interesting to hear that the different groups have similar ideas but the way they presented those ideas had quite different implications behind them. Some of the important highlights I gleaned from the discussion included the fact that everyone should be on the same level of accuracy. The county level is the best place to determine needs for the county, which is a simple and common sense approach but it is invaluable to do. Parcels should be mapped according to their value, meaning that prioritization of parcels is key. Communication is very important to determine the user’s needs, educate the public about parcel mapping and the importance behind it, strengthen collaboration between parcel mapping professionals as well as collaboration between the professionals and the public, etc. Parcel mapping is always a work in progress and one needs to provide a product for the user but at the same time continue towards an ultimate end game. It is important to aim for perfect and complete, but to accept incremental improvements and local prioritization matters. It is crucial to mandate parcel mapping and mutual respect between WLIP and PLSS is beneficial. It is good to have a professional surveyor. Funding is very limited so educating the public as well as elected officials is very important in order to convince people to invest money into these efforts. PLSS is the foundation of determining property taxes. At the end of the discussion we were asked to answer a question. What is the most important step we can take to improve parcel mapping? There were quite a few different answers and I enjoyed hearing other people’s thoughts on the matter. I personally thought the most important step is to educate the public and government on this application and its importance. This in turn will help the projects receive more funding as well as to help facilitate collaboration and ultimately ease the process of parcel mapping and create a better product in the end.