Governing Magazine/December 2000

FOCUS: GIS

FOCUS ON GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS: MAPS THAT SELL

Communities are finding that the combination of GIS and the Web can be
a powerful tool in the competition for economic development.

By Ellen Perlman

Fast-food spaghetti with an Asian flair likely would have come to
California whether the city of Vallejo's Web site had mapping software
or not. But Vallejo's geographic information system technology made it
easy for the No. 1 fast-food chain in the Philippines to take a
virtual tour of the city when searching for California properties. The
result: The company ended up locating its North American headquarters
in Vallejo.
 Of all the California cities with large Filipino communities the
company was targeting for its Jollibee restaurant chain, only Vallejo
offered the sophisticated site-selection system. "It made it a lot
easier for us and helped us to communicate with our company in the
Philippines," says Arnie Balague, director of development for FSC
Foods Corp. Executives in the Philippines were able to tap into
Vallejo's geographic and demographic data at
www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/ed.html and view sites, prices, square footage
and local demographics at the same time U.S.-based company
representatives were location-shopping.
 GIS, of course, is not new. But the computer-based tool for mapping
and analyzing spatial data hasn't been a mainstay in economic
development departments. When governments started using GIS as far
back as two or three decades ago, it was employed mainly for land use
planning and engineering. "Governments were getting into GIS as a way
of managing information with a spatial component, and doing it because
everyone else was doing it," says Bill Syversen, manager of new
technologies for DuPage County, Illinois.
 Now, GIS is coming out of government back rooms where the techies
work and moving into policy making and marketing offices. A broader
variety of government agencies is getting into the game, and economic
development departments are part of that trend. "It has an incredible
capacity to crystallize an idea and summarize information in a rapid
way," says Eric Anderson, city manager of Des Moines and a member of a
group called Local Leaders for GIS. "Interest is increasing, use is
more widespread, and it's moving into the policy area. It's becoming
more and more valuable."
 The use of GIS has been something of a leap for economic development
departments, where technology has not generally played a large role.
The business of selling a city or a region mostly has been conducted
on a personal level, the deal-making done through schmoozing and
handshakes. Economic development marketers may have tax incentives to
offer or send glossy brochures and videos promoting their
jurisdictions as good for jobs. "The mindset within the economic
development industry as a whole was that they were doing fine with the
methods they had," says Christopher Thomas, state and local government
manager at ESRI, a GIS vendor.
 But that is changing quickly in the competition for jobs and tax
revenue. Not only are economic development departments turning to GIS
as a hardcore analysis tool but they are focusing on the Web to make
using it quick and convenient.
 GIS can provide a wealth of information to businesses researching
sites. And it gives jurisdictions the opportunity to present
themselves in ways they never could before. Rather than sending static
information on what the unemployment rate was the day a marketing
brochure was printed, a city or region can offer a business a Web site
with real-time information that can include traffic counts near a
chosen site or the number of restaurants within one mile. Companies
can find up-to-the-minute information on lease rates, on how buildings
are being used, and on their vacancy rates and square footage.

ANSWERS IN SECONDS
Vallejo has been the trailblazer in offering geographic, demographic
and economic information interactively on the Web. It went online in
mid-1998 and has served as the model for other jurisdictions.
Vallejo's economic development site gets an average of 50 daily
visitors, and more than 25,000 users have visited so far.
 One need look no further than Vallejo's shopping center vacancy rate
to surmise that the city's online GIS must be having an effect on
economic development. Since the system was launched, the vacancy rate
has declined by more than 46 percent. Granted, the economy has been
good, but Vallejo believed it had to be creative and aggressive in the
GIS game because businesses naturally flocked to big cities such as
San Francisco and Los Angeles, bypassing the medium-sized cities.
 Another part of the magic of Web-based GIS is the ability it has
given the city to market to businesses not just in California or
around the United States but everywhere. "The World Wide Web has given
us access to the whole wide world," says Anatalio Ubalde, community
development analyst for Vallejo. Before going online, Vallejo wasn't
much on the map in the eyes of faraway companies looking to relocate.
In the past two years, people from 77 countries have visited
"virtually."
 Vallejo's system is able to answer in seconds three basic but
essential questions: Is there space for my business? Is there a market
for my business? And what is the competition or compatible businesses
in that location? For instance, if a bookstore wants to locate in a
particular area, it might want to know whether there is a coffee shop
nearby, which would complement its business, or whether there are
already several bookstores in the area.
 That's not a hypothetical situation. The owners of the Booklovers
Haven Bookstore and Cafe located their enterprise in Vallejo after
learning from economic reports on the GIS system that there were no
bookstores at all in Vallejo, that average household income was more
than $55,000, and that a third of the city's residents hold a college
degree. The bookstore moved from 20 miles away, where it faced
competition from independent bookstores and national chains.
 A motion picture studio searching for a location to film a movie has
been using Vallejo's Web site. And small businesses are shopping for
space online by square footage, finding available properties that
previously had not made it onto property lists because they were so
small. Vallejo has devised a secure system that enables real estate
brokers to update, delete and modify their property listings, saving
the city the work of maintaining the database.
 The Web site also cuts several initial steps from the economic
development department's work. Previously, Ubalde would literally
spend a whole day looking for one property for an interested business.
He would get a call and scramble to call brokers and find a few
properties to offer up. He'd put out maybe 10 calls, getting many
voice-mail messages along the way. "It was taking me two days to get
back to a business to answer a fairly simple question: `Do you have
space for my business?'" says Ubalde. "It was a huge investment of
time."
 Now, he can answer that question in about 30 seconds. Recently, he
was contacted by a business that had used the city's high-tech tools
to narrow its search. By the time Ubalde got the call, the company
already had four buildings in mind. At the first meeting between the
city and the potential leasers, the group headed out to look at the
buildings. "Normally, we'd meet and greet and talk about the city and
what the possibilities were," Ubalde says. "They already knew. They
had found it on the Web site."

AN EDGE OVER COMPETITORS
Economic developers in DuPage County are confident that GIS is giving
them an edge over surrounding counties, although it's difficult to
measure. "When people call looking for information, I sit down with
them and tailor GIS information to meet their needs," says Syversen.
Of the six counties in the Chicago area, business growth and economic
development is highest in DuPage, where GIS implementation is "well
out front" of the other counties, he says. "We have achieved the
lion's share of economic development growth in contrast to neighboring
counties in the Chicago metro area."
 Using GIS can sometimes be daunting, however, if there isn't someone
to sit down and hand-hold a prospective developer through the process.
Hoping to be helpful to the business community, the Atlanta Regional
Commission made GIS available on CDs to all the chambers of commerce
in the region. Only one or two took the ball and ran with it. The
learning curve was too great for most of them.
 As simple as the commission tried to make the software, such programs
can be tough to work with unless they are used routinely. "Although
GIS has gotten significantly easier to do, it's still significantly
difficult for a lot of people," says Art Kalinski, GIS manager for the
commission. "Unless you use it every day, it's a tough software to
learn quickly and use productively."
 The commission set up a service bureau early this year to do the GIS
studies for the businesses interested in relocating to the area,
charging by the hour. Companies seem more than willing to pay for the
detailed information GIS can offer, considering the amount of risk
involved in starting a business.
 In January 1999, a few months after Vallejo pioneered the use of Web-
based GIS for economic development, Tacoma, Washington, also launched
an Internet site (www.tacomaspace.com)to promote development in the
downtown. The area had been suffering from urban decay for years,
after a large mall opened in the area and downtown stores moved out.
Like Vallejo's site, Tacoma presents multiple listings for commercial
space for lease and sale.
 The system also proved its worth internally when a GIS analysis was
used to support a downtown plan for economic development. Tacoma had
come up with a plan to rezone the downtown to promote development, but
local officials wondered if the zoning changes would be appropriate.
The city was able to use GIS to show what the downtown would look like
built out with the new zoning provisions: building heights, building
sizes, setbacks. The technology could simulate the impact on traffic
and see where parking would be. It enabled the city to decide that the
new zoning was appropriate. "The graphic showed it really well, what
it looked like," says Donna Wendt, a GIS analyst with the city's
Economic Development Department. "You can't plan really well without
GIS." And the visual explanation helped sell the idea to the council
and the planning commission.
 Tacoma has included aerial photos of the downtown area that one
developer called "incredible" and very valuable for marketing efforts.
Along with color-coded maps, users can get actual photographic views
of building layouts, parking lot locations and street grids.
 Thematic mapping is the future of GIS for economic development,
believes Sanjay Jeer, senior research associate at the American
Planning Association. An example would be color-coded maps showing a
specific area where college-educated people are concentrated. That
would enable a user to easily search for locations based on factors
other than square footage or proximity to a rail line.
 That enhanced technology of visualization, enabling potential
residents and businesses to view land parcels, and at the same time
know where the parks are, what open-space policies are and where
families of various socio-economic levels live, holds enormous value.
"Cities are finding they can't just sell properties," Jeer says. "They
have to sell the whole community and all the other things that go with
living in that community."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form
without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited.
Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of
Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
http://governing.com