The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (Midpen) — which manages more than 65,000 acres of public land in the San Francisco Bay Area — deployed a new enterprise land acquisition system to replace a siloed and outdated property transaction database.
IMPACT
The new system provides a modern database and an enterprise hub of web mapping applications for tracking, querying and visualizing land managed by Midpen. The district leveraged its existing enterprise GIS to create custom solutions that reflected the inherent spatial nature of land acquisitions.
Midpen’s long history of land preservation is now recorded in a centralized, enterprise system that provides a variety of self-service GIS operations to all levels of stakeholders for streamlined and effective greenbelt stewardship. Highlights include:
- The entire organization gains unique insight through a hub of six interactive dashboards with filterable charts and infographics for consistent and accurate reporting.
- Data stewards easily modify geospatial features and related tables in a web browser for collaborative and distributed editing.
- Field crews monitor easements and properties with development restrictions for compliance, even when offline.
- Executive management can query lands protected with legislative, grant and partnership support to understand the benefits and impacts of these initiatives.
- Board members receive land dedication updates through stylized maps and reports printed directly from web apps for efficient information sharing.
- External stakeholders consume land acquisition data through open data for improved transparency and public engagement.
ADVICE
Midpen leveraged existing technology and in-house talent to create a system uniquely tailored to its business operations. The district offers the following advice to other special districts that wish to replicate a similar innovation:
- Conduct extensive business discovery with your stakeholders
- Carry out research to determine whether a third-party SaaS or in-house COTS solution is right for your organization
- Anticipate significant time dedicated to data quality
