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Benefits—While much of the early justification for the GIS was cast in the context of "cost savings over the long term," LOJIC user agencies have promoted and realized significantly more tangible and intangible benefits in the areas of data cost recovery, elimination of data redundancy, data automation, interagency communication and coordinated systems development.
In an effort to lay the foundation for cost recovery, LOJIC management played a vital role in amending the Kentucky Open Records Law  to allow cost recovery for GIS data and products. LOJIC staff served on committees that drafted revisions to the law in the 1990 and 1994 Kentucky General Assemblies. The first specifically allowed the sale of GIS products and data produced by public agencies. The second eliminated the special consideration of GIS data, and required that all data produced by public agencies be considered as records in the same way. This has broadened the cost recovery potential for public entities throughout the state.
LOJIC has recovered nearly $1,200,000 over the past ten years through the sale of products and services. Digital map data, customized map products, orthophoto imagery and the Red Book Property Atlas are examples of such cost recovery generators. LOJIC is in the process of expanding its products and services list through development of a generalized atlas, zoning maps, and direct on-line access license agreements. Policies are in place to coordinate product distribution and fee schedules among all participant agencies.
The most commonly identified benefit realized by LOJIC user agencies has been the elimination of redundant data sets, sharing a common geographic database and accepting responsibility for routine maintenance of their respective portions of the overall database. A good example of this is the current effort among the public works and utility organizations within Jefferson County to share information on the location of maintenance and infrastructure improvement projects so that work may be tracked using the GIS. Another example of how this has benefited the community involves engineers and developers who acquire digital mapping. Use of LOJIC data from the onset of a project will enable digital submission of subdivision plans and record plats which has facilitated development review and will allow us to evaluate innovative options for long term change detection for base map updates.
Probably the most important effort to eliminate redundant data has come as a result of the development of a master address file. In 1994, LOJIC began a project to establish and maintain a correct address and tax block and lot number for every parcel in Jefferson County. The goal of this effort was to create a county-wide site address coverage for use in geocoding. The project established coherence among the GIS property database, the core database for the city’s Land Management Information System (LMIS), and the Real Estate Master File (REMF) which is the core database for all property data maintained by the PVA. To date, the project has assigned a verified address and tax block and lot number to 98% of the nearly 285,000 parcels in Jefferson County. Procedures have been established through local ordinances for assigning and maintaining official addresses, both as site addresses and street block ranges, by the Jefferson County Division of Planning and Development Services (DPDS) using the LOJIC GIS. The availability of reliable, centrally maintained address data has resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for LOJIC applications across all user agencies, and has allowed the LOJIC GIS to be the primary data source for recently implemented local E911 and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) operations. In addition, MSD and many other agencies have begun the process of standardizing their various internal address files against the authoritative address database on LOJIC.
Of particular benefit, both to members of the LOJIC consortium and to the community at-large, is the increased cooperation and communication among governmental agencies, especially in the area of network and systems development. Because of the success of the LOJIC consortium, initiatives have begun over the last two years to develop a joint fiber optic network connecting the agencies of city, county and state government and the office sites of MSD, Louisville Water Company, and some schools within the urban area.
CityNet will save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and increase the level of technology utilization and data sharing among these various public and private entities. Connection to the Insight Cable’s fiber network is also being investigated to promote Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) operations, and expand the overall LOJIC network to additional remote sites.
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