April 16, 2008 Meeting Minutes and Agenda
AGENDA
1. Approval of the March 19th meeting minutes – Chair
2. CAT 3 Grant Update
3. Subcommittee Reports
• Financial – Larry Harwood
• Policy & Marketing
• Technical
• Orthoimagery Project /Parcel grants – Larry Harwood
• Status on the GEOPortal – Mike Smith
MEETING MINUTES
Present
William Hanson, Chair
Dan Coker, Co-Chair
Nancy Armentrout
Michael Smith
Elizabeth Hertz ( by phone )
Greg Copeland
Gretchen Heldman ( by phone )
Kenneth Murchison ( by Phone )
James Page
Jon Giles
Staff
Larry Harwood
Visitors
Dan Walters, US Geological Survey (USGS) ( by phone )
Bruce Oswald, Oswald Associates ( by phone )
The meeting was called to order at 10:05
1. Approval of the March 19th, 2008 meeting minutes
The Chair entertained a motion to approve the minutes. Jim Page moved
to approve the minutes as written. Greg Copeland seconded. The Board
voted 9 in favor, none opposed. The motion carried. (NOTE: unless
otherwise indicated the Chair abstains from voting)
2. CAT 3 Grant Update
Nancy Armentrout reported on the status of the Fifty States Initiative,
aka the CAT 3 Grant project. The Sewall team had submitted the day
previous a project schedule and list of deliverables. This would be
subject to approval by the project team which was listed as follows:
Will Mitchell, Project Manager
Bill Hanson
Greg Copeland
Marilyn Lutz
Nancy Armentrout
Dan Walters, USGS Maine Liaison
Diane Godin, Somerset County Registry of Deeds
Steven Weed, Bar Harbor Assessor
Four data gathering forums have been scheduled. April 29th will
be in Auburn, May 6 will be in Bangor and May 7 in South Portland,
all locations to be announced. The fourth forum will be in Augusta
on April 30th and is for state agency personnel. A registration log
has been set up on the Geolibrary website so that people can register
in advance. Some smaller meetings to be attended by some of the Sewall
team are also scheduled. There is a May 21st meeting with the Land
Use Regulation Commission ( LURC ) and Maine Revenue Service and a
May 20th meeting in Caribou with Northern Maine Development Commission.
Nancy described the events and action items for the project to date
which is given here in summary form.
• A presentation at the Maine Municipal Association Technology
Conference, which presentation was attended by 120
• A “master list” of GIS contacts has been assembled
from existing listings, i.e. Geolibrary stakeholders, MEGIS listings,
Tech Conf attendees, etc.
• Additions have been made to the Geolibrary website for providing
information, registering for more information, registering for the
forums, a blog site and the survey
• A Geolibrary listserver has been created
• The project survey has been finished and is ready to go.
• The project team is scheduling bi-weekly conference calls
A draft of the project survey would be out by Monday ( Apr 21st ).
The project team requested that all comments on that survey be back
by Thursday (Apr 24th). In conclusion the project really gets going
by the end of April.
Q: Which survey exactly are you referring to here?
A: This is the survey for the public at large; the other surveys you
are thinking of were for the Board and the Technology conference attendees.
This survey will be posted on the internet.
Q: Is it wise to contact people multiple times by e-mail? Will they
resent this?
A: The point is well taken but this will be the last of the “shotgun”
announcements and we will apologize in advance in the message. Also
we can remove anyone from the lists if they ask.
Q: Can we put an announcement right on the state’s homepage?
A: Perhaps. We will look into it.
Sidebar
Jon Giles reported that at the annual meeting of the Maine Society
of Land Surveyors GIS was mentioned but not discussed in any detail.
Apparently the lack of a specific spokesman for GIS put a damper on
the topic.
3. Subcommittee Reports
Technical
Orthoimagery & Parcel Grants
Larry Harwood reported that Quality Assurance/Quality Control ( QAQC
) has been done on about 80% of the previously expected orthoimagery.
There is an additional area of 2 foot resolution orthoimagery which
had not been expected. This was in an area of eastern Penobscot/southern
Aroostook/northern Washington counties which had been flown in 2004-2005
but which the Geolibrary had no funds to orthorectify. The USGS had
found funding to do the orthorectification. All QAQC should be completed
in 2-3 weeks. It will then be decided when to proceed with compressing
the imagery and making it available for download.
GeoPortal
Mike Smith reported that the GeoPortal should be running as an “out
of the box” application within a week or so. As soon as it is
technically feasible, Anji Redmond at MEGIS will start loading all
the state metadata into the GeoPortal. The next step will be a process
of customization of portal functions with the vendor Environmental
Systems Research Institute (ESRI).
The Memorandum of Agreement ( MOA ) with the University of Southern
Maine (USM) has not yet been signed. There were some questions on
the first draft and that had to be re-written. The new draft is on
the desk of the CIO, Dick Thompson, awaiting his signature. As the
operation proceeds, Christopher Kroot will be the Board member primarily
dealing with USM.
Financial
In accordance with the vote at the last meeting, item #5 “Amount
under consideration - Standards conformity/data validation tools”
has been removed. The $25,000 under this item was added to the “Funds
not under consideration” which is now $57,164.00. There are
no other changes.
Policy & Marketing
There was nothing to report on this item.
Sidebars
Dan Walters noted that the Maine GIS Users Group (MEGUG) would like
to work with the Board to administer the “Master List”
of people interested in GIS in Maine. Nancy Armentrout, Will Mitchell
and Larry Harwood are presently combining their various lists into
one. Currently Dan is co-chair and Mike White is chair of MEGUG.
There was some discussion of membership terms. Some Board members
will not be renewing their membership upon the expiry of their terms.
Membership will be an item on the next agenda.
There was discussion of how to better stay in touch in with members’
“constituencies”. It was suggested to put together a list
of “constituent GIS Users” for each seat on the Board.
Mike Smith was asked to describe the Flood Insurance Rate Map project
at MEGIS. There was discussion of how funding might be obtained for
LIDAR collection statewide in support of better flood zone mapping.
Joe Young, Maine Flood Management Project, State Planning Office will
be invited to talk to the Board on this at the next meeting.
The meeting adjourned at 11:00.
1 Light Detection and Ranging) is an optical remote sensing technology
that measures properties of scattered light to find range and/or other
information of a distant target. It can be used to derive high resolution
elevation data.
