Greg Bunce: Welcome. This is the first episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we are from the soon to be UGRC, Utah Geospatial Resource Center.
Matt Peters: Resource Center.
Greg Bunce: Resource Center, thank you. Wow. I gotta get this right. We’ll be bringing news, the focus of this podcast is to bring Geospatial news from throughout Utah and bring it here. So leading off here for the first episode, I’m gonna hit Matt up with a couple questions and right out of the gate here, what is AGRC and what is the role of the state GIS office?
Matt Peters: Well Greg, I guess first thing, we better say UGRC for that Utah Geospatial Resource Center. But the role of the state office, well we’re here to promote and facilitate GIS at a very basic level. But really, we are here to have this State Geographic Information Database that is a resource for a lot of people doing GIS in Utah to access that data. Kind of think of you want to get started in GIS? Well, the SGID, State Geographic Information Database, is a perfect place to come and get some base data for yourself. If you’re a state agency, we’d like you to contribute data to it. If you’re a county or a city, we’ll hope you feed data to it as well.
So back a million years ago, the SGID was something that I guess you could say the idea for the SGID came out of Scott Matheson’s office doing a study for like, should spatial data be kind of in one spot for people to use? Should it be centralized? And it was decided yes, it should be, and in the early days there were different studies done by big name consulting firms that came to Utah and said, “Yes, you should have a Geospatial Office.” They weren’t calling it geospatial back then, but you get the idea. And ESRI come in and done a study early on when they were still ESRI, not Esri. And everyone said yes, this idea of having a State GIS Office with a State Geographic Information Database was a good idea. And in the early days that database was just populated from project work. We did a project, the data went into the State Geographic Information Database. And a little tidbit, I bet you didn’t know Greg, is that there was a study for a Super Collider out in the west desert of Utah.
Greg Bunce: I did not know this.
Matt Peters: Yes, see now…
Greg Bunce: What year was this?
Matt Peters: I think it was in the 80s. I just can’t remember the year.
Greg Bunce: Wow.
Matt Peters: But yeah. Old things I found at AGRC. And then at one point we’re called AGR, Automated Geographic Reference, and then Automated Geographic Reference Center, and now Utah Geospatial Resource Center. So that’s kind of your little history lesson.
Greg Bunce: Yep. And so that one’s coming in this year, right? In May? UGRC, when do we officially move into that?
Matt Peters: I just received another notification today that now it’s at printing, whatever that means. So yeah, essentially the Governor has X time frame to sign a bill. If he doesn’t sign it, it will just go into law unless he vetoes it. So, essentially we’re set. We’re UGRC.
Greg Bunce: And then begins all the logo changes and everything that follows.
Matt Peters: The work begins.
Greg Bunce: And the rebranding. Rebranding ourselves.
Matt Peters: Yes.
Greg Bunce: So really Utah was an early adopter on all this GIS geospatial stuff.
Matt Peters: Yes. Yes.
Greg Bunce: Which is one of the takeaways there is that back in the 80s and you’re talking about GIS, and I don’t know that many states can actually speak like that.
Matt Peters: That’s true.
Greg Bunce: It’s interesting. Which speaks to the SGID as well, which is why it is where it is today.
Matt Peters: Yes, and I think that that’s the important thing to note with the SGID is that we have the core layers, what you might call framework layers: roads, address points, parcels, administrative boundaries. But then a lot of our partners, other state agencies, are contributing data as well. And we have federal partners too now. I guess you could think of the SGID as years ago, yes, it was more centralized. But now, there’s an index and you can actually reference services from other agencies and from the federal government. So, a little different but we still consider it SGID.
Greg Bunce: That’s a good point. It’s almost like a centralized catalog. Whether we’re serving the data or we’re pointing you to the data, it’s an excellent starting place as a catalog to look for data.
Matt Peters: I think if you have to think back to your childhood in the hippie love days of the Whole Earth Catalog and access to tools. You know, it was just a big catalog, the Whole Earth Catalog. And you could look at the SGID like that.
Greg Bunce: So what are some of the new things coming up for UGRC? You got the name change coming this year…
Matt Peters: Yep.
Greg Bunce: And then we got the move from the State Office Building.
Matt Peters: Yeah, the State Office Building is going to be destroyed.
Greg Bunce: Sadly. In my opinion.
Matt Peters: Yes, because I actually rented a house near the State Office Building back 10 years ago, or 11 years ago. So I kind of set myself up to go to work very closely. But now that we’ve been in the pandemic and we’re teleworking, it’s like why do we need to go to this office? But the state of Utah bought the American Express building that was near the Calvin Rampton complex for UDOT out in Taylorsville. And they have revamped the whole building and made it a nice space for us.
Greg Bunce: And can you still bike there?
Matt Peters: You can work it out. There are some bike trails that will get you close, as well as the Green Line will take you to West Valley Central and you can bike the last mile or so to the building.
Greg Bunce: Cause I know every single day that I’ve worked at AGRC, now UGRC, you’ve pedaled your bike to work.
Matt Peters: For many of those days, yeah. It was a 30-minute walk or a 15-minute bicycle ride.
Greg Bunce: So then another thing worth discussing is the restructuring at the state level. Currently we’re under the Department of Technology Services. Maybe you can speak a little to some of the new restructuring with the new Governor and some of the legislation that just passed.
Matt Peters: So this last week now AGRC is still part of Technology Services, but now it’s the Division of Technology Services under the Department of Government Operations. The new CIO now is Alan Fuller, and the new head of Government Operations is Jenney Rees. And there’s a whole lot of shaking going on. And so we’re gonna see a lot of changes, but you know what? AGRC has a strategic plan, we have a mission, we have a lot of people at AGRC with a lot of years of experience. We know what we need to do to keep rolling. But I think that we need to now pivot and change our focus.
Greg Bunce: That’s another good point with all this. I think we should probably note that the name change isn’t tied anything to this new restructuring. They’re kind of running independently. The name change is coming out of the strategic plan and that would have happened no matter how we were, whether we stayed in the same structure or not. But really, this may elevate us, moving GIS into broader levels of government, which kind of goes into some of the next topics here of some notable GIS stuff happening at AGRC.
Matt Peters: Yeah, and I think that to lead it off you gotta say something that has been on our minds for almost longer than I can remember, is Next Generation 911.
Greg Bunce: Yep. Well, like you said, I think we have Next Gen 911 fatigue almost. It’s to the point where it’s finally happening and it almost seems like wow, it is finally happening. But to speak on that, we did submit a variety of data sets… Motorola won a contract at the state to handle the call processing side of 911, which is the maps on the screen at the dispatch centers. And then they won also the contract to route the calls. So you place a 911 call, GIS data is now gonna be used starting in August in, I think, parts of Weber County, parts of Davis, and Salt Lake—a little rollout there first—but the data that we’re all contributing to—the state road centerlines, the address points, the PSAP boundaries which we finally all have agreement on, Emergency Service boundaries, all of that stuff—is going to be the driving force behind 911. And we just submitted the data to one of Motorola’s vendors this week and like I said, that’s moving forward there.
Another one to mention is the election system. The state now hired a vendor to manage and build out the election system at the state level. So these two scenarios are kind of like GIS is now moving from a little area over there in our world, now out to the larger systems, driving these systems. And I think we can talk maybe more about the election system in different podcasts, but to note that everyone’s going to be using GIS data to get ballots rolling and all re-precincting and stuff like that throughout the state.
Do you have any other topics? Might be LiDAR or imagery?
Matt Peters: Yeah, so LiDAR, amazingly Utah is 75% covered by LiDAR. And I would have never guessed that. I thought we had a very big uphill battle but really a lot of money coming from FEMA through the local DEM has really helped enhance that. At the moment though, unfortunately, a lot of the LiDAR is tied up at the USGS, I’m afraid. With the pandemic, there’s been a slowdown in the QA/QC, but we’re hoping for at some point the dam will break. Imagery: Utah will be flown at 6-inch for the whole state probably somewhere in June-July timeframe. As you may know, Utah has varied terrain, varied elevation, so to do the whole state in one go it needs to be the right time of year. That’s very key. And Greg, I wonder though, we kind of talked about that, but we haven’t talked about much about SGID data and how we share it with people.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, good point. You kind of alluded to it early on about opening up to the new model of the SGID. Traditionally you would send data to our office and we would serve it somewhere in a database and we would do updates that way. And we still do that that way, but we’re definitely taking more advantage more and more of ArcGIS Online and how you can share data through there. And that platform has definitely gotten much more stable and much more useful to us over the past, I’d say maybe a year, year and a half, two years. But really with the state agencies now, many state agencies are hosting their own GIS data. The days are kind of gone where you need us for storing data in a database. And the beauty of them hosting their own services is that we’re now able just to integrate their services directly through some sharing processes and then we can point users through our catalog, through our Whole Earth Catalog… we can point users right back to these authoritative sources. And the additional beauty there is that they’re not… we’re not waiting for data updates anymore. Folks are making the data updates and edits on their end, in their services, and it’s instantly viewed for any SGID user. So I think that’s been good. So if there’s any interest in wanting to learn more about that, it’s on our data page. Or reach out to myself or Matt about that. And if you feel like you’ve got any data sets out there that are state-worthy, that are statewide data sets that are of interest to many folks, definitely reach out and we should get you hooked up with that.
Matt Peters: Sounds like black magic to me.
Greg Bunce: I think it’s peppered in there a little bit.
Matt Peters: There were some advancements in GIS… well I don’t know if I go that heavy, but in this last legislative session here in Utah, AGRC’s code was opened and some changes were made that said we would be very supportive about working on affordable housing. And here in Utah we have parcel information and we have land information records that are tied to parcels that have increased information about a parcel. And what we’re going to do, we’re going to be working with others, such as Wasatch Front Regional Council and MPO, and we’re going to look at how we can find where the best places for affordable housing. And we’re going to be using that land information record to do that. And so for me it’s this notion of you start you say, “Please share your data. Please share the land information record.” And then you say, “Okay, these are questions we need to answer with your land information record. Can we answer these questions?” If no, we need to improve the data. If yes, great. Then we need to move away from the populated areas and go to less populated areas. Can we answer the questions with that data? So more and more demands will be placed on rural Utah for data quality and data improvement because the issues are changing. Years ago, this wasn’t an issue for rural Utah. And now as Salt Lake is exploding, Salt Lake County, Utah County, Davis County, Weber County, Cash County, the rural folks are feeling the squeeze of the city folks, it’s becoming more of an issue.
Greg Bunce: And I guess it puts us in more of a collaborative mode as well with a lot of this as it moves forward.
Matt Peters: Very true. Yeah, and speaking of collaboration, the GIS Advisory Council is something that I kind of revamped or re-started recently. And it’s just a representative from a variety of state agencies and we’ll include some Fed federal people and others, but the goal is just so we’re tighter integration of what each agency is doing with GIS, make sure we’re collaborating and working together better.
Greg Bunce: I’m looking on the page right now and it’s helping define minimum metadata standards for the state, so I think that’s a key thing, and a list of resources for GIS contacts throughout the state. I think those are really valuable.
Matt Peters: Yeah, and I think as well it’s policy things like what should the metadata standard be? GIZAC says X. It’s kind of a policy developing body.
Greg Bunce: GIZAC meaning the Utah Geographic Information Systems Advisory Council.
Matt Peters: Yeah.
Greg Bunce: That’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
Matt Peters: And I guess one important note to make is that GIZAC is actually defined in administrative rules. It’s the real deal.
Greg Bunce: So like in state statute?
Matt Peters: It’s got a statute, but in what they term administrative rules.
Greg Bunce: Gotcha. Okay, well closing us out here today, we figured we throw a little tidbit in and we’re announcing that as of about a week or two ago, we did get the 2020 census geographies loaded into the SGID. And that means that you could use them as web services, you can download them as shapefiles, file geodatabases, or you can consume them in our post-GIS database directly. But what those are, these are the geographies that came out first and the census is still working on demographics and those typically would have been out, but there’s been a little delay this year. And you should be seeing those in September. And this is the stuff that a lot of folks will be using for redistricting. So redistricting is also kind of waiting on getting some of this demographic stuff. So stay tuned for some of that information that will append to the spatial data that we’re serving right now. I guess one final tidbit on that is as you’ll see on our data page is that some of the blocks we’ve lost blocks this year, which is actually a good thing from the past. This is the first year they were using some kind of automated algorithms to kind of predict what a block should look like and using that type of algorithm they’ve deemed that many of the blocks in the past weren’t necessary due to their size or things of that nature. But Matt, do you want to take us out here for the first official episode?
Matt Peters: Well you know Greg, I do though I have a question for you now that you mentioned losing blocks. So I thought I remembered some blocks that were unusually large but the population was all in one part of the block.
Greg Bunce: That could be… I didn’t look at a detailed analysis of all of it. That definitely could be going on but population definitely played a role. Like you’re saying, it didn’t make sense to have such a small amount of population in a block. And like you’re alluding to is what I’m thinking as well that things got merged. And the algorithms figured that out and said, you know, this should just be a block.
Matt Peters: I think you’re on to it. Okay. Well, everyone, thanks for listening. And we hope to include a lot of folks from the GIS community to put some folks on notice: Buck down in Wildlife Resources, Phoebe at the University, Eric Edgley at Wildlife Resources, Aaron Austin, just all you all our colleagues we want to hear from you. We want to talk to you. Adam Radel from UDOT, Core Younger from UDOT. I won’t pick on anyone else. But you all have been here for quite a while, you have a lot of experience, a lot of things to add to the community. So we want to mine all the collective experience we have here in Utah and share it with people. So thanks for your time.
Greg Bunce: And I’ll just add, drop by our website and sign up for the newsletter if you haven’t, and you can get us on Twitter at @MapUtah.
Matt Peters: So what is the AGRC website? Or should we say UGRC?
Greg Bunce: Yeah, UGRC, right. Well the beauty there is that it’s staying the same. That’s gis.utah.gov.
Matt Peters: Great.
Greg Bunce: Okay. Talk to you next time.
Matt Peters: Yep. I’ll still be here.