City and county departments — most notably public safety entities — will now have access to aerial imagery of Clark County through a new contract with a company called Pictometry.
Clark County Property Valuation Administrator Karen Bushart gave a presentation Wednesday to the Clark County Fiscal Court about the new program. The PVA office purchased a six-year contract with Pictometry, Bushart said, and will give the data to Clark County Geographic Information Systems to use to enhance its current data.
The contract will cost the PVA office about $17,000 per year, Bushart said. Currently, the Clark County GIS maintains a digitized map of the county with information attached to a geographic location.
Pictometry will allow GIS to have a map of all the structures in the county, but from all sides, not just an aerial view, Bushart said.
The PVA office is a member of the Clark County Consortium for GIS, and will offer training on Pictometry in August for all members. Other entities that fund the CCGIS are the Winchester Board of Commissioners, Fiscal Court, Winchester Municipal Utilities and the Clark County Board of Education.
“The training will be for police, fire, schools, any interested parties to come and be trained,” Bushart said. “. ... It will be available to ... anyone who is a member of CCGIS.”
GIS members will be able to access the Pictometry data from anywhere using a mobile device or a computer.
Bushart said the program will be particularly useful to the 911 dispatch center and the Clark County schools.
For example, she said, in the event of an emergency, such as a fire or standoff, emergency personnel would be able to look at all angles of the school building using the software.
Pictometry, which has 67 aircraft, does flyovers to shoot new imagery every two or three years. Bushart said Pictometry will fly over Clark County every two years.
A feature that Pictometry has that Bushart would like to look at in the future is one called Change Finder.
“(When) they fly the next flight, (and) they actually think they can do it from our last GIS flight, they can place it over your previous flight and show you what changed,” she said. “So if anything’s built, if anything’s burned, it’s picked up immediately. So that way a field person can go directly to the sites that changed and not have to go countywide looking for changes. So it’ll be very efficient for my office as well.”
Bushart said the Change Finder program is not currently included in the budgeted $17,000 for the system.
In other business, the court:
— received $35,000 in excess commissary funds from Clark County Jailer Bobby Stone. Judge-Executive Henry Branham said Stone tries to return funds from that account every year.
“We can only use those funds to reimburse the Fiscal Court for medical expenses of the prisoners,” Branham said. “That’s state law.”
— approved an agreement with Stoneybrook Homeowner’s Association to maintain greenspace on Old Boonesboro Road in the Stoneybrook neighborhood.
Under the agreement, Fiscal Court will pay the Winchester-Clark County Parks and Recreation Department $3,000 per year to maintain the property, and the Stoneybrook Homeowner’s Association will reimburse the county $1,500.
Contact Katie Perkowski at kperkowski@winchestersun.com.
