Greg Bunce: Welcome to another episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we’re from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center. This podcast will be bringing you Geospatial news from across Utah.
Today on the show we’re going to hear from Kate Staley. But before that, Matt and I thought that we would give a high level overview of SITLA. Where they’ve come from and why they’re important in the state.
Matt Peters: I guess you gotta go back to Thomas Jefferson, who really believed that a strong democracy is founded upon education for all. And so Jefferson proposed that every new state entering the union, land should be set aside to support public schools and important institutions.
So lo and behold, Utah, 1896, Congress granted land called Trust Lands to the new state of Utah with the provision that the revenue earned from the sale or lease of the land would be placed into permanent endowments for 12 institutions.
Public Education, Utah School for the Deaf and Utah School for the Blind, Utah State Hospital, Juvenile Justice Services, a Miners Hospital, University of Utah, Utah State University, College of Education, College of Mines and Earth Sciences, U of U, Reservoirs, and Public Buildings. Wow. How come we didn’t get in on this?
Greg Bunce: I mean UGRC was established back in the 1890s, right? So we did get gypped there.
Matt Peters: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Greg Bunce: I think it’s important to bring all that up and that is different from SITLA. That literally is just Congress saying that you at statehood get Trust Lands as a state. You get a certain amount of sections. And for us it was what? 2, 16, 32, and 36. But that doesn’t seem to be across the board. I was looking into some of the other states before us. Some early states got maybe one section per township. It was a little bit scattered. And a couple other interesting things I noticed was Texas didn’t seem to get any federal land. I don’t think there was any federal land there. And Alaska, by the time Alaska went to statehood in the 1900s. Essentially they kind of did away with, I guess 1958, Congress did away with the whole Trust Lands and said, “Hey, pick a 100 million acres as federal land and reserve it as forest.” Which somebody said I found equated to about 10 sections per township if you added it up. But really, what you’re saying, a lot of this can go back to the General Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance that basically says, “As a state, at statehood, here’s some land to use for finances,” right?
Matt Peters: Yeah. And it just, when you think about that, Section 2, 16, 32, 36. How more disparate could you get in a township?
Greg Bunce: True. Yeah.
Matt Peters: SITLA puts them together and consolidates them so they can get a bigger development or a mineral lease or rent or royalties, a variety of those things. And do you know what year SITLA was created?
Greg Bunce: Yeah, 1994 by the Utah Legislature. And I guess at that point, originally at statehood, we were granted about 7 million acres, but by the time 1994 came around we had about 3.4 million acres left. So about half when SITLA was set up to kind of then start to manage these lands.
Matt Peters: Wow. And did you know that they have generated since ‘94, they have generated 1.96 billion in revenue?
Greg Bunce: Yeah, that’s kind of crazy.
Matt Peters: Yeah, to help grow all the permanent funds to 2.5 billion. Yeah.
Greg Bunce: Which primarily is the, I think I was noticing on the website, like 95% of that is the public schools get. Of all that whatever that revenue they dish out. So that 2 billion just kind of sits in an account, but then they dole out, I believe in 2020 it was saying about 95 million dollars. And 80 something million goes to schools specifically. And of that, about 25% of that the schools decide to use for computers, tablets, and stuff.
Matt Peters: And that’s kind of, when you think of that, think of the sections that SITLA gets. I mean you can see why they have Kate and her team doing GIS work because there’s a lot of spatial analysis that has to happen to keep all this land straight.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, and I think like you said, the land swapping where it’s so scattered throughout. Didn’t you have some examples up in Box Elder or you were aware of something going on up there where they’re trying…
Matt Peters: Well, just through my work at UGRC, look at the state a lot and look up in Box Elder County. And it almost seems like in parts of Box Elder, it looks like the original pattern. Where in a lot of other parts of the state, the land has been consolidated. So Box Elder is just this funny decoration of blue squares for me. I just find it fascinating.
Greg Bunce: Well, I think that’s a good background on leading into our interview here with Kate. Anything else?
Matt Peters: No, I’d say let’s put her on.
Greg Bunce: All right. Well, let’s hear from Kate.
Matt Peters: So, Kate, do you feel like this is an interrogation?
Kate Staley: Oh, yes.
Matt Peters: I think the main thing we’re trying to get at is, this first time we’re just talking to people, getting a little bit of their background. But Greg has some generic questions, but I think in the future you guys really have some issues that we can discuss and that will help people understand more about SITLA and what the importance is.
Greg Bunce: So maybe the best thing to do today is to start out with just a little background on you and how you got into GIS.
Kate Staley: Sure. As a little kid, I always loved maps. The World Atlas was my favorite book. I used to memorize different cities and the flags of the different countries. And I also used to draw imaginary cities and islands as a kid just for the fun of it. When I got out of high school and started going to college, I wanted to study meteorology cause I had this weird obsession with the weather, thunderstorms in particular. So I thought that would be pretty cool. And it also has lots of maps involved too, so I was pretty stoked about that. But after taking a semester of the required courses for meteorology, I decided that calculus and differential equations was not for me. So I decided to pursue a geography degree at the University of Utah and also the GIS certificate. And then after taking the cartography class and an Intro to GIS class, I realized that this was something I wanted to do. I was hooked. And I realized that this was a field that was going to be advancing at all times and continuing to advance. And I thought that was pretty cool. So I graduated in 2006 with my degree in geography and then I got an internship with SITLA. And then I’ve been with SITLA ever since.
Matt Peters: Wow. I am floored. You could be knocked over with a feather. That is quite a story.
Greg Bunce: Matt, your mic might be, it sounds a little funny. I don’t know if you need to get closer to it or if there’s a little bit of an echo.
Matt Peters: I think it’s in your ears.
Greg Bunce: There you go. That’s perfect.
Kate Staley: Okay, cool.
Greg Bunce: I think it’s interesting that you kind of came into GIS from a different field or you started out in either meteorology or something and then GIS appears. It almost seems like a common way folks enter into GIS.
Kate Staley: Right.
Greg Bunce: So SITLA, the Schools and Institutional Trust Land Administration. It’s a mouthful there.
Kate Staley: It is.
Greg Bunce: And a super cool administration. The stuff that you guys do over there. One of the things that I’m thinking of is we manage the State Geographic Information Database and one of the key layers in that database is the Land Ownership layer. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that or what’s happening at SITLA, what other layers and yeah.
Kate Staley: Sure. So right now currently the Utah Test and Training Range exchange was recently approved for the exchange of lands between the BLM and SITLA. And the purpose of the exchange was to consolidate land ownership for both BLM and SITLA and to remove SITLA ownership within the Test and Training Range boundaries where development would be incompatible with critical national defense uses of the range. So right now we are currently working to update the land ownership to reflect the approval of the exchange. And that should be updated within this week I think. And then we’ll be updating our maps to show that.
Another project that’s keeping us busy is integrating the land ownership to the current PLSS version. Currently our land ownership is aligned to the 2006 version of PLSS and it’s really outdated. So our group has come up with a plan using ArcGIS Pro to rubber sheet the land ownership to the current PLSS. And once we’ve successfully have done this with the land ownership, our goal is to do this with our other working layers.
Greg Bunce: And I think I’m aware of some of that that’s happening at UGRC as well. Some of the roles that we’re playing in that. But back to land exchange, is a lot of the management and maintenance of the land ownership layer swapping out layers like that or swapping out land like that with exchanges? What keeps that layer so active? Because I think of that as a very active layer.
Kate Staley: It really just depends on how BLM and SITLA decide what they want to trade in and out of. It can be changing constantly. I believe this exchange has been going on since 2016 or 2017. So you can see it’s been a long long process. And there were changes to the exchange all up until this finally got approved.
Greg Bunce: And there’s different exchanges going on as well on that layer right? Not just with the BLM? Or is it only BLM?
Kate Staley: We do have other exchanges. Most of them are with the BLM, for instance the Bears Ears and the Emery County exchange. Those are both with the BLM. We do however once in a while have exchanges with other state agencies like the DWR or maybe sometimes not usually private, but it’s usually other state agencies. But mainly the federal government.
Matt Peters: So Kate, I’m kind of curious about some of your challenges and solutions you’ve kind of implemented to get over those challenges.
Kate Staley: Sure. So as I stated before, we are trying to integrate the land ownership to current PLSS lines. We started this process in 2016 and we partnered with two other agencies to accomplish this. And we decided that we wanted to go forth by using Esri’s Parcel Fabric. So our goal was to have one complete land ownership layer that would always be in sync with the PLSS. This has been a very very long process. It’s been tedious. We’ve had many bumps in the road. And the Parcel Fabric is just a complicated beast. I don’t think it has really been tested enough on statewides basis. It’s mainly I think for your local county or cities. So it’s been really difficult to try to navigate.
Another issue that we’ve had with this project is that the different agencies are in different versions of Arc. So you have maybe one person’s in ArcPro, another’s in ArcMap 10.5, another’s in Arc 10.8. And it makes it very difficult to really coordinate and sync the land ownership. So SITLA, we decided to just break away from that and kind of decided to go with using ArcGIS Pro using a rubber sheeting method. So what we’re in the process of doing right now is creating rubber sheet links between the old and the new PLSS and then basically verify those links to make sure everything looks good. And once we have that all set, we intend to use those links to do the rubber sheeting process to move the land ownership to the current PLSS.
Greg Bunce: And I wanted to point out and acknowledge that you guys were early on with us as we tried to move with more data sharing. So originally the land ownership layer in the SGID, we were picking up from you guys with Python scripts on a weekly basis and then we were duplicating it on our side. But we had this idea about a year or two ago to just kind of pick up your data live using ArcGIS Online and streamline metadata. And you guys were one of the early adopters of that. Just wanted to point that out that we’ve worked with you on the metadata, getting that in a way that fits into the SGID well. And also that that layer now if you hit that layer in the SGID, it’s literally hitting your live data. And I think that’s cool. There’s no more lag time or shelf life at UGRC on that layer. So thanks for being open to that.
Kate Staley: Yeah. And our intent is to, once we get the land ownership integrated, we’re going to work with UGRC to make a plan to do updates on a regular basis so we’re always in sync with each other. But yeah, the Parcel Fabric just was not working for SITLA and it was very time consuming and we really need to get the land ownership moved over now and it’s just been taking a long time.
Greg Bunce: Sounds like a manual process.
Kate Staley: Yeah.
Matt Peters: Yeah, big challenge.
Greg Bunce: Thinking about the land ownership layer, what are to you some common uses of that layer that you’re aware of?
Kate Staley: Well obviously I think a lot of people use it for reference as am I on federal land or am I on state? Am I on private? I think a lot of people do use it as a more detailed reference, for boundaries and trespass and so forth. But yeah, I think it’s used a lot with other agencies and in the public just to see where somebody might be at on the map. Maybe they use it for collecting data out in the field or just as a reference on their maps. But yeah, I think it’s a highly used layer.
Greg Bunce: Yeah good point. I mean I view it as one of our Tier 1 or what we call our framework layers. Something that gets regular updates, something that has solid metadata. We have a good relationship with the steward. And also it’s heavily used and data sets can be derived from it or tied to it. I think it checks all of those boxes. So I totally agree. I think it’s a valuable layer to the state.
Kate Staley: Yeah.
Matt Peters: I guess Kate, I’m kind of curious. You have for your agency, you have quite a GIS team. How many folks have you got?
Kate Staley: So including me, there are five. And so we have Barry Biedecker, Brady Johnson, Gage Coats, and Katie Romig.
Matt Peters: Wow. And everybody keeps pretty busy, hey?
Kate Staley: We are extremely busy with just exchanges, applications, and trying to figure out ways to improve our online portal. To make our data more accessible.
Greg Bunce: What is the heaviest used data sets that you guys have?
Kate Staley: I would say definitely the land ownership is one of those. But also like in-house I would say all of our contract layers like easements and special use lease agreement, oil and gas contracts. Just things like that.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, that makes sense. Does the land ownership one that requires the most effort and maintenance?
Kate Staley: I would say so, yes.
Matt Peters: Well, thank you again for coming on the show and appreciate your time.
Kate Staley: Good. Thank you.
Greg Bunce: Okay. All right. Well I think that went well. There you go. Another one in the books. Almost. You got it.
Matt Peters: I think that was great. I think we read the same page which was great.
Greg Bunce: When you started off with Thomas Jefferson, I said, “Ah, I think this is the page that I looked at.”
Matt Peters: Yeah, cuz I sure as hell don’t know that.