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Web/GIS Application Gives Small City Big Help

Vallejo, Calif., turns to GIS to replace jobs lost to the closing of a naval shipyard.

When the Mare Island Naval Shipyard closed in 1996 after 112 years of operation, Vallejo, Calif., lost about 50,000 jobs, and $500 million annually from its economy. For this community of 116,000, economic development became a top priority. At the same time, larger San Francisco Bay Area cities, including Oakland and Alameda, were also scrambling to recover from base closures and attract new businesses to their communities. In an effort to gain an edge on the competition, Vallejo gambled on a new Internet marketing tool, one that would stand out above Web sites displaying pages of static demographics and statistics, the format used by all cities for online marketing in economic development.

Web/GIS Application

GIS Planning Inc. of nearby Berkeley came up with a solution. The firm presented a plan for a Web/GIS application that would enable property-management firms and prospective businesses to enter site-specific criteria, pull up a list of matching properties, and then analyze socioeconomics and business profiles in a user-selected radius around each property, in the city or on Mare Island. According to GIS Planning CEO Pablo Monzon, the technology to develop such an application only recently became available. Before the Vallejo application, no municipal Web site used as a marketing tool for economic development had this capability. The City Council decided to go for it.

Only databases of demographics, available commercial properties in the city and on Mare Island, and a comprehensive street layout were needed to move forward with the project. Off-the-shelf demographic and street databases were available for every city in the United States for less than $2,000 each. Vallejo Economic Development Analyst Anatalio Ubalde pointed out that the city did not have a street database, nor the time to develop one.

Partnership Builds Database

The heart of the application was the properties database. Monzon and city staff approached Vallejo real estate and property-management professionals with the idea of working on this. The response was enthusiastic. Focus groups from the real estate community and city staff decided on the fields of information and designed standard forms for property entries and descriptions as they would appear on the Web page.

"Development of the database was actually facilitated through a one-hour session in which we introduced the application to all of the real estate professionals connected to Vallejo," Ubalde said. "So many people showed up that they were literally overflowing out the door."

Monzon incorporated the group's design into an online database and added it to the application. Once the Web site was up, real estate brokers logged on with passwords and began entering data on available commercial properties, the address of each automatically geocoded by the application. While the city can access the database to review it and track available properties, it is maintained and kept current by the real estate community.

Ubalde said the project created a new relationship between the city and the real estate community. "We promote their properties, and they bring in new businesses. It means better services and jobs for citizens and a larger tax base for the city."

Putting It Together

In addition to commercial databases, development of the application was made possible by the recent release of ESRI's ArcView Internet Map Service (IMS) software. To produce the application, Monzon first modified ArcView IMS using Java and Avenue programming languages. He then added the demographic database from CACI Marketing Systems of Arlington, Va., which the U.S. Census Bureau is going to use for the 2000 census. Next came street files from GDT Inc. (Geographic Data Technologies) of Lebanon, N.H. Vallejo did have a database of business licenses, which Monzon geocoded and linked to the application.

Since Vallejo inherited an archaic database of Mare Island from the Navy, the city brought in a consultant to verify the data and correct inaccuracies. The corrected database was then linked to the application. By July, Vallejo's Economic Development Information System (VEDIS) was up and running, the entire project completed in 31/2 months, at a cost of about $40,000.

How It Works

Visitors to the VEDIS home page click into the application's "Maproom," then enter their requirements for the size and type of building or property desired, whether retail or industry, for rent or sale. The application brings up a list of available commercial spaces matching the user's parameters.

Clicking on any space in the list brings up a map of its location in the city or on Mare Island, a photo of the building or land, and a detailed property report -- building descriptions, available parking, land use, transportation, access to roads, highways, rail lines -- the list is quite extensive. Users can then select any radius around the property and click on the data required: population breakdown, socioeconomic, consumer expenditures, etc. They can also pull up reports on the types of businesses within the area to determine if they are competitive or complimentary. Any point on the map may be analyzed in this manner with a few clicks. Prospective buyers can get traffic counts for streets and highways, and determine distances to transportation terminals and links to mass transit systems. Users can also find redevelopment project areas and see what tax incentives are associated with them.

Responses

VEDIS has only been operational since July, but property-management professionals and businesses that have relocated to Vallejo have already praised the project. Asera-Pacific is a property management and research firm that provides location services for companies making major investments in relocation. Owner Larry Asera uses VEDIS to access information for his clients because the site saves time.

"Instead of going down to the planning department, the public works department, talking to several realtors, I can go to one source and in a few minutes pull up the information the client needs to determine if there is a fit," he said. "This is as opposed to taking a week to get the information. We could lose the client in that time."

Asera said VEDIS provides the kind of detailed information his clients need to determine if a space meets their needs. "If a client is considering putting in a restaurant, they want to know what the traffic count is on a certain corner. All I have to do is zoom in on the coordinates to get it."

Bookstore owner Sandie Lynne moved her business to Vallejo largely on the basis of demographic and economic reports. Earlier, Lynne had the same impression of Vallejo many other people in the Bay Area had. "I always thought of Vallejo as a blue-collar town -- poor, low education, certainly not a place for a bookstore."

The reports showed, however, that Vallejo has an average household income of more than $55,000, with more than a third of the city's residents holding college degrees. The reports also showed that there were no bookstores in the city. Within a few months of relocating, Lynne's Booklovers Haven Bookstore Caf