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Home > Committees > GeoParcels Working Group

Updates

Feb 15 2012 Parcels for Hancock and Washington County are largely complete and available from the MEGIS data catalog. An additional 114 towns are being prepared by Spatial Alternatives of Yarmouth, details are in our contract.

GeoParcels Working Group

Bill Hanson, Rudman & Winchell, Board member; Paul Hoffmann, Sheepscot Valley Conservation Assoc, Board member; Michael Smith, MEGIS, Board member; Dan Walters, USGS, Board member; Diane Godin, Somerset County Registry of Deeds; Steven Weed, Bar Harbor Assessor; Judy Mathiau, Rockport Assessor, former MRS staff; Laurie Thomas, Maine Revenue Service (MRS)

Maine GeoParcels: Integrated Land Records

What properties have water access?  Where is the land in the Tree Growth program?  Where is the real estate in foreclosure status?  How many private parcels abut or are in visual range of wind farms?  How many individual properties lie over a particular wetland or deer yard?  Where are all of the properties that have sold or split in the past year?

All of these questions could be answered, and mapped, with simple queries against Maine GeoParcels - an integrated land records system linking records currently maintained across Maine.  This system does not yet exist but its concepts are being developed and tested with a pilot underway in Hancock County. 

At present, answering any of these questions involves time and costly searches of records maintained at several levels and geographic areas of government.  Today there is no way to see the whole picture of land information in the State of Maine. 

When land records that are keyed to digital parcel maps (such as tax maps) are integrated with information from municipalities, counties and state agencies, the resulting efficiencies and economies promote more effective land  planning and management.  The Maine GeoParcels project aims to capture these public benefits.

Over the past two decades geographic information systems (GIS) have been used to enable these tools, primarily at the local level in larger cities.  Maine’s GeoLibrary has been working toward building these datasets and integrating these systems more cohesively through targeted grants and planning efforts over the past eight years.  

Maine GeoParcels Vision

GeoParcels Pilot Project Subgroup

Nancy Armentrout, PUC, Board Member; Aimee Dubois, Town of Scarborough, Board member; Steven Weed, Bar Harbor Assessor; Michael Smith, MEGIS, Board member

GeoParcel Standards Subgroup

Steven Weed, Bar Harbor Assessor; Ellen Jackson, Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC); Anji Auger, MEGIS