Van Buren County GIS Update

In 2015, the Van Buren County Drain Commissioner was awarded a $431,000 grant through Michigan’s Stormwater, Asset Management, and Wastewater (SAW) program which enabled them to upgrade the efficiency of record retrieval, drain inspection reporting, soil erosion permit inspecting, and APA soil erosion plans and inspections.

 Before the upgrade, typical field inspections required preparation in the office. The Drain Office had stand-alone ArcGIS desktop software that was used to create maps illustrating drain centerlines, drainage districts, contours, high-resolution aerial imagery, and other GIS data that was stored on the local network file server. Office staff had previously used GIS to collect some spatial information about their drains, such as the drainage district boundary and the drain centerline location. However, the spatial information was being compiled on an as-needed basis and, therefore, only included drains that had received petitions in the past 10 years. Furthermore, this GIS information was not integrated with existing scanned information. This made tracking down information a headache in the office and often impossible in the field.

The Drain Office’s task of performing drain inspections has been updated so that photos and locations are no longer manually produced from separate files. This was accomplished by assigning route identification numbers to all the county drain GIS features and publishing a new set of GIS layers to record locations and photos of obstructions, debris, and erosion. The inspection layers are collected using iPads in the field with ArcGIS Collector. After the inspection points and photos are collected, the drain inspection’s points can be summarized in a drain inspection PDF using an ArcGIS Online Web App specifically set up to report on drains. This report includes a map portion illustrating the photo locations and a corresponding photo report sorted by station.