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Urban Renewal and GIS

Casper moves to redevelop a blighted area with the help of GIS.

Just west of downtown Casper, Wyo., are 157 acres of abandoned buildings -- the faded remnants of old restaurants, empty motels, former auto sales lots and railroad tracks that haven't been greased in years.

Called the Corridor, this area along the old Yellowstone Highway, was recently deemed a blighted area suitable for redevelopment by the City Council.

The old Yellowstone Highway was once the principal route through town. After the interstate was built, lack of traffic and two abandoned railways that bisected the area ruined business. A nearby 360-acre oil refinery, abandoned in 1991 by Standard Oil, added to the area's blight. The company, now BP Amoco, is still cleaning up the area, and expects to continue for the rest of 2004.

The city plans to replace the abandoned oil refinery with an 18-hole golf course, a small office park and possibly a performing arts center. These additions are part of a renewal plan designed to redevelop the 157-acre Corridor.


Planning for Redevelopment
The City Council convened the Casper Urban Renewal Agency to form a process for getting businesses to reinvest in the area and clean it up. Thus began the redevelopment plan. The city is using GIS software to access and organize the Natrona County assessor's data for evaluation and categorization of properties relative to age, condition and value.

Property evaluation is key to the renewal process. An understanding of land use, age of buildings, how buildings are constructed, property vacancy, infrastructure capacity and current infrastructure demands are essential to identify opportunities for renewal and the barriers involved.

That's where GIS comes in. The city already had the GIS software and was using it to develop more links to county information. The renewal agency used GIS maps to display properties and buildings and link them to key data from the county assessor.

The data is housed in a newly created Microsoft Access database, according to Patricia McKenzie, president of Stellar Programming and Consulting, who worked with the city on the project. The database is a subset of the main assessor database.

Locations of properties and buildings are shown as polygons on GIS maps made from aerial photos the county took in the early 1990s. Each polygon links to the database and reveals the property's history. Each building was given an ID number. Either the address or ID number can be used to reference the property in the database.

Linking data in the database to specific locations on the GIS maps was the hard part and took about two years, McKenzie said.

"You have to go to each [property], put a point on the map and type in the address," she said.

The area contains more than 900 land parcels, some of which have five or more buildings, making for a labor-intensive process of labeling each building and land parcel. Each property is also geographically coded with coordinates of its location.

"Going out and doing fieldwork makes sense and could have been accomplished with this size area, but we knew the information was available in the county Assessor's Office," said David Hough, director of Housing and Community Development for the city. "We saw the need to get a sound inventory and good background information on all the properties in the Corridor. We wanted to have a complete database on ownership, land description and trends."


No Bulldozers This Time
The city has experience with this type of project. In 1979, an area called the Sandbar just north of the Corridor was notorious as a reliable location to find prostitutes. So the city established the area as an urban renewal corridor.

The difference then was they did it the old-fashioned way -- without GIS, Hough said.

"They came in with the fire department and bulldozers and cleared a pretty substantial area," he said. "The city turned around and worked with individual property owners to rebuild desirable businesses in this area."

The result of that effort was a new City Hall, fire station and senior housing project.

But times have changed.

There's a new City Council, a new committee and reliable information at the Assessor's Office that can be accessed with GIS. So the city hired a consultant who previously worked on GIS projects with the city.

"She went about the process of formatting the county assessor's data and combining numerous tables and databases they had that wouldn't talk to one another," Hough said. "She put that into a uniform format that would then link into the GIS tools by either property PIN or by address. Then we focused on the information we were interested in -- the type of buildings, the age of the buildings, the exterior building material ..."

Key to getting landowners involved in the renewal process is how properties are assessed.

"We didn't want to be the ones to go to the property owner and say, 'Your property is junk,'" Hough said, noting that the assessor has a logical and objective way to determine whether a building is in fair, good or poor condition. "We felt we could say here's a defendable way of describing people's property for them."

The city also saw GIS and the current renewal project as a way to develop a better relationship with the county, Hough said.

"We saw this as an opportunity to push forward our desires to get a better tie-in with the county assessor's records, and use this as kind of a pilot project to show how we could set up a system that would be used not just citywide, but countywide."