Tinley Park village trustees have agreed to join a Geographic Information System Consortium that will allow staff to tap into a shared system of information maintained through high-tech digital mapping systems.
Assistant Village Manager Steve Tilton said if approved by the end of the year as expected, the hardware and a full-time consortium staffer could be in place as early as January.
Village officials offered support for the plan after learning the system is expected to save $50,000 to $75,000 a year normally spent on other hardware and to outsource work the village can do in house with a GIS, Tilton said during a committee meeting last week.
For example, the village pays engineering company Robinson Engineering $4,000 once a year to update its City Watch alert system with contact information from residents who want to be alerted about emergencies near their homes. With GIS, updating the same information on a regular basis can be done in house, Tilton said.
Other cost savings are expected through creating efficiencies for village staff, officials said. The system would maintain village-wide records on each parcel of land in Tinley Park that could be accessed by every department. Currently, most departments maintain their own records.
With the system a village employee could type in an address and retrieve every piece of information available on the property, ranging from school district boundaries to sewer system maintenance to building permits to public safety records and more.
“The more information you can put in, the more powerful of a tool it can become,” Tilton said.
In addition to making information more accessible, staff could also create projects with the mapping system that would generate revenue for the village, such as tracking down vehicle sticker scofflaws and conducting utility audits, Tilton said.
The first-year pricetag to join the consortium and get started with hardware is $303,000. The total five-year expense is $1.46 million. That includes a full-time staff person who is employed by the consortium, but will work at village hall to maintain the system, create GIS projects and assist other staff, according to the village.
The consortium is managed by Des Plaines-based MGP Inc., a company that provides the tools and access to the system and staff to maintain it. The communities in the consortium also access some of the same general information through shared maps and collaborate on projects and ideas about how to use GIS information in new ways, officials said.
Some of the other 17 communities in the consortium include Des Plaines, Elk Grove Village, Highland Park, Oak Brook, Lake Forest, Skokie and Glenview.
