Oskaloosa GIS Services

The City of Oskaloosa has turned to HR Green on several occasions in recent years to execute community projects. Geographic Information Systems (GIS services) have played a critical role throughout.

A few years after developing a GIS database and mobile data collection application for the Oskaloosa Municipal Water Department, HR Green was asked by the City to grow this GIS to accommodate data for the community’s sanitary sewer and stormwater systems. HR Green did so, drawing upon industry-standard GIS design, in-house engineering experience, and client input.  The updated GIS database was made accessible to City staff through web mapping applications consumed on both desktop and mobile platforms.

The City also turned to HR Green when it needed a high-accuracy asset inventory of sanitary sewer and stormwater sewer assets to populate the City GIS.  In addition to collecting high-accuracy locations, HR Green GIS specialists and certified National Association of Sewer Service Companies (NASSCO) inspectors examined manhole conditions, recorded attribute data, and attached asset photos. The sanitary sewer asset inventory included inspections of all accessible manholes in the system.

HR Green’s GIS services team developed user-friendly mapping applications for use both in the office and the field. These included mobile applications for data collection and asset locating as well as desktop applications for monitoring collection efforts and summarizing system data. Certain applications were geared more toward public works and engineering staff, while others were also leveraged by the City Council and for public involvement purposes. Later, a web portal would be created for land developers, providing them with information about sewer proximity and capacity. All web applications were tailored for an audience with little knowledge of GIS, and on-site training for the City’s web mapping applications was provided by HR Green GIS staff.

At the same time that HR Green GIS specialists were inventorying Oskaloosa’s sanitary sewer system, they were also helping to advance the City’s brownfields revitalization efforts. To help the City identify and prioritize properties for assessment and redevelopment, GIS modeling was used as a critical component of a comprehensive approach. The brownfields prioritization model developed by HR Green was robust enough to examine every parcel in the community against dozens of environmental and redevelopment GIS map layer criteria. Using this approach, HR Green created a distinct, actionable brownfield redevelopment roadmap for Oskaloosa. Lastly, progress toward this roadmap was documented in GIS and communicated to the public via a regularly-updated brownfields redevelopment progress web portal.