St. Charles, IL – Walla Walla County, located in southeast Washington, covers approximately 1,299 square miles and includes approximately 35,000 land parcels.
The County recognized a need for a state of the art mapping system to optimize GIS-based land records management and keep their maps as current as possible. The County turned to The Sidwell Company to provide the professional GIS services to enable them to achieve these goals.
As part of this project, Sidwell will convert the County’s existing CAD-based cadastral data into an Esri™ geodatabase and Sidwell’s Tag Data Model. The County also elected to purchase Sidwell’s Parcel Builder® software. Parcel Builder is a suite of software developed by Sidwell for the specific purpose of creating and maintaining cadastral maps. It is compliant with ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS 10, and extends the functionality of Esri’s ArcGIS software platform by introducing over 40 tools to improve GIS-based land records workflows.
Sidwell will also provide remote web-based training to the County on ArcGIS and Parcel Builder. Due to the current financial constraints imposed on many local government agencies Sidwell is pleased to offer a cost-effective approach to training. This web-based approach to training allows agencies to reduce costs to training without eliminating curriculum.
According to Debra Antes, Chief Appraiser/Statistical Analysis with the County, “We chose the Sidwell Company and Parcel Builder because it is designed to optimize the process of specific tasks associated with maintaining the assessor’s parcel maps, in conjunction with the descriptive text-based data.”
Furthermore, “We hope to gain greater efficiencies and decreased duplication of effort and maintain the parcel data in the ArcGIS format, along with the specialized Parcel Builder Suite, to maintain the geographic parcel data and easily integrate the text-based descriptive data.”
About Sidwell
The Sidwell Company is an employee-owned firm providing integrated land records management solutions and GIS mapping and software development to local government and private-sector organizations across the United States. Sidwell’s premier parcel mapping solution, Parcel Builder™, is currently in use at over 150 sites nationwide. Sidwell also offers a full range of aerial photography and photogrammetric services, and is the Midwest Distributor and Authorized Reseller for Ashtech products and solutions. For more information about Sidwell services and products, call 877.SIDWELL (877.743.9355) or visit www.sidwellco.com.