GIS Integrated Canvassing Program

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

The Washington County Assessor’s Office is responsible for discovering, listing, and valuing all property in its jurisdiction. The initial and vital part of this process is discovery. To improve the discovery process for businesses, the GIS department and Business Personal Property (BPP) staff collaborated to develop a workflow that would maximize the number of businesses discovered while reducing the workload of field canvassing by applying shared data from the major cities in Washington County. This was accomplished by using information from the cities which includes business names, licensing specifications, and addresses which are attributed on the data point layer. By applying this data, the GIS staff was able to determine which businesses were currently assessed and those not assessed the previous year; solving two issues: businesses that were missed in the previous canvas and capturing new businesses. Using business point data from the cities, a grid structure was constructed to support logistics management for the discovery process. A report was generated for all businesses not assessed in each grid so BPP canvassers could use ArcGIS Navigator to move from one location to another in the most efficient manner possible; while recording the businesses using the ESRI product Survey123.