Statement of Purpose

The Henry County Geographic Information System provides improved methods for collecting, managing and using location based information to analyze trends, design spatial models and develop projections to support decisions making processes and enhance public access to data in an equitable manner.

 Mission Statement

Henry County will promote fact-based decision making for both day-to-day operation needs an doing range planning to benefit citizens of this County. The Henry County Geographic Information System, hereinafter GIS, will enable elected officials, department heads, county employees, public and private agencies and citizens of Henry County to graphically view and analyze information, and apply GIS technology to Henry County issues.

Goals

• To provide a cost-effective means for coordinating, sharing and disseminating location-based information in an equitable manner.
• To enhance communication among local, regional, state and federal government agencies, as well as utilities, businesses and industries through cooperation and data integration.
• To promote increased awareness about GIS technology and applications to the public and private agencies.
• To coordinate the development of GIS databases within Henry County in order to reduce redundancy and increase efficiently. 
• To provide technical assistance for Henry County GIS projects.
• To update and maintain Henry County's digital cadastral base map.
• To maintain the Henry County digital orthophotos.
• To create and maintain GIS data standards for Henry County.
• To assist with compiling and maintaining information (metadata) about Henry County GIS data.
  
  

Our Road to GIS . . . .

Pre-GIS

• Parcel maps maintained manually on clear mylar and presented in large aerial photography map books. 
• Farm landuse maps were also manually maintained.
• Farm calculations performed with a planimeter by taking the average of three measurements for each soil and landuse type. Some farms took days to calculate properly, even then the measurements always varied a little. 

1999

• Contracted with The Sidwell Company for the creation of a computer based cadastral mapping system including aerial photography.

2001

• Created GIS department, under the management of the Assessor's office, with one full-time employee funded entirely from recording fees using the GIS Document fund.

2002

• Received final deliveries of cadastral mapping system using Bently Microstation Geographics which included custom Sidwell mapping tools and macros.

2003

• Added two part-time positions to begin mapping farm landuse and perform other GIS mapping duties.

2004

• Completed mapping farms landuse
• Started calculating farms soils with GIS thereby reducing the time to calculate a farm from many hours to just a few minutes.
• Moved one person from part-time to full-time status. GIS Dept now staffed with two full time and one part-time positions.
• Preparing to implement farmland Bulletin 810 procedures for 2006 assessments.

2005

• To complete Bulletin 810 requirements, The Sidwell Company was contracted to convert our current system to a seamless county-wide cadastral geodatabase using ArcGIS and Sidwell's Parcel Builder and FARMS software.
• Installed dedicated GIS Server.
• Mapped voting precincts for the County Clerk.

2006

• Began distributing complete GIS dataset to township assessors on CD-ROM with ArcReader

Future Plans & Goals

• Obtain updated aerial photography
• Online access to GIS data.

GIS Data Summary

Coordinate System

• North American Datum 1983, State Plane Illinois West (NAD_1983_StatePlane_Illinois_West_FIPS_1202_Feet)

Primary Geographic Features

Feature	Description
Cadastral_Anno	Textual elements (annotation) with subtypes like lot or parcel dimension
Cadastral_Line	Polyline's are "tagged" as one, or more, of the following features: Corporate, County, Geographic Township, Indian, Lot, Misc., Parcel, Political Township, Railroad Centerline, Railroad Right-of_way, Road Centerline, Road Right-of-way, Section, Subdivision, Water
Cartography	Linear features which help describe other features like ownership hooks, dimension tics, etc.
CorpPoly	Corporate boundary
Flood_Poly	To designate bulletin-810 flood areas
GeoTwpPoly	Township boundaries used for meets & bounds legal descriptions (e.g. T15N R5E = Kewanee Township)
Landuse_Poly	Designates farm land use
ParcelPoly	Area designated to be a parcel
PolTwpPoly	Township boundaries as politically designated
SectionPoly	Township section boundaries
Soils	Soil Survey from NRCS
SubPoly	Subdivision boundaries

System Configuration

Server
HP ProLiant DL380 G4
3.20 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 (2 processors)
4GB RAM
170GB Raid5
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft SQL Server 2005

GIS Software
ESRI ArcSDE - For maintaining versioned geodatabase
ESRI ArcEditor - Geodatabase maintenance
ESRI ArcView - Geodatabase analysis and reporting
ESRI ArcReader - Free geodatabase viewer

Other Software
ParcelBuilder - Cadastral geodatabase mapping toolset
ESRI Publisher - Generate documents for ArcReader
ESRI Maplex - Advanced label placement engine
XTools Pro - Additional GIS tools