The 2007 Oregon Legislative Assembly passed House Bill 3337 requiring the Cities of Springfield and Eugene to establish separate Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs) by December 31, 2009. Facing budget cuts, staff reductions and ever-increasing demands for geospatial services, the City of Springfield, Oregon, automated complex procedures while supporting citywide urban analysis, and accomplished the task ahead of time and under budget.

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The 2007 Oregon Legislative Assembly passed House Bill 3337 requiring the Cities of Springfield and Eugene to establish separate Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs), dividing a metropolitan boundary shared by the two agencies for more than 25 years. This mandated significant residential and commercial land supply analysis within each respective UGB by December 31, 2009.

Establishing UGBs in Oregon requires addressing local needs, regional policies, statewide planning goals and administrative rules. This includes inventorying residential and employment land, establishing growth management strategies (e.g. UGB expansion vs. infill) and dealing with a myriad of thorny issues such as public facilities and services, natural resource management and preservation, and available vacant land. Tasks involve significant public involvement with public hearings and review by City Council, the Springfield Planning Commission, Lane County Commissioners and the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD). The process requires much effort and coordination.

Proactive Response

Pursuing general UGB expansion possibilities and State Planning Goals, the City had acquired consulting services to conduct a Goal 10: HOUSING (see Oregon Planning Goal 10) needs analysis and had initiated a residential buildable lands inventory in 2006. Following passage of HB 3337, Council directed the Public Works Department (PW) to develop a contemporary land use database and the Development Services Department (DSD) to perform an accurate Commercial and Industrial Buildable Lands Inventory (CIBL) study. Recognizing the need for strong ties between the two efforts, the departments collaborated on internal memoranda parsing unique responsibilities and establishing two tightly interconnected tracks:

•    Track One (CIBL): Inventory of commercial and industrial lands and a projection of the acreage needed to accommodate Springfield’s future commercial and industrial needs, and analyze alternative locations where the UGB might be expanded to accommodate the city’s future commercial, industrial, and residential needs.

•    Track Two: Development of a contemporary database and tools to repeat the analysis identified above, as required by the City, to perform commercial and industrial buildable land studies and support Track One.

The collaborative approach established strong ties between efforts already underway by the Development Services Department (DSD) and data development and automation efforts soon to begin in the Public Works Department (PW). Working together under a joint PW/DSD project, the City aimed to coordinate data development and analysis in an efficient and cost effective manner.

By December 2007, City Council awarded the contract to perform a CIBL to support an Economic Opportunities Analysis (EOA) and any required Goal 14: URBANIZATION (see Oregon Planning Goal 14 ) amendments necessary to accommodate Commercial, Industrial and Residential Lands Inventories. In January of 2008 Public Works signed on under separate contracts and began work in February of 2008.

The City’s goal was twofold. First, perform technical analysis to determine any need for possible UGB expansion and, if needed, develop technical analysis and findings to support a UGB expansion. Second, establish a “Contemporary Land Use Database” capable of supporting these analyses and supporting subsequent iterative analysis as required by the City. As mentioned, these elements took form as two well-coordinated tracks. The diagram below illustrates the approach to this larger goal.                 

After defining the tracks with key components, interdependencies, process flows and general time lines, PW began to hone in on Track Two. The City’s PW’s GIS team began with the following objectives:

•    Support Track One data requirements

o    Locate and compile best available data
o    Refine existing data holdings as required to meet analysis requirements
o    Manage data acquisition projects as needed to support data needs (refinement and creation)

•    Manage Track Two application development

o    Define high-level analysis needs
o    Define detailed analysis steps
o    Produce automated procedures that reduce planning analysis effort
o    Provide a flexible and robust set of repeatable of analysis tools that required minimal administration overhead

•    Leverage internal resources and regional partnerships to contain cost and expedite delivery

Teams incorporated objectives into the Track Two work plan, allocated staff and contractual services resource and established key dependencies to assure tight coordination with Track One. Track One could not be held up by Track Two as the City faced a hard deadline imposed by the state. The GIS team pragmatically converted each objective into distinct deliverables, converted each deliverable into specific tasks, assigned specific portions of the budget and merged adaptive management practices with rapid application development practices to shepherd the project.

Defining Deliverables

To succeed, all Track Two deliverables had to come together in support of Track One. Automated analysis tools and detailed technical specifications had to support simple cyclic execution of the various CIBL analyses as Stakeholders worked through the policy issues. New ortho imagery and land use deliverables had to be in place in time to support final runs with the analytical tools. Interdependent deliverables had to support an efficient, iterative environment where parameters adjust, analysis repeats and reliable information informs the results. Success required coordination, collaboration and continual adjustment.

One key component of the project that exemplified the opportunity to leverage regional partnerships and provide broader utility to stakeholders was the development of supporting data. Much of the data used to support the analysis was refined from the City’s existing GIS inventories, which helped to effectively integrate the outcomes across several business areas such as Planning, Transportation, and Environmental Services. Beyond those standard datasets, the original task of developing a comprehensive land use database was re-evaluated and evolved into a sub-task, which called for extensive field-checking to validate the current land use layer and update as necessary. The team also identified the need for more current aerial imagery to reflect recent changes on the ground since the previous flight in 2004.

Both the land use update and the orthoimagery acquisition proceeded in close partnership with long-standing regional GIS subcommittees on behalf of LCOG (Lane Council of Governments), the Cities of Springfield and Eugene, and Lane County to develop required standards, methodologies, and timelines. The City teamed with LCOG to assist with these aspects of the project because of their well-established role as the central authority for warehousing and maintaining such data, and their existing infrastructure and staff expertise to perform the necessary QA/QC in concert with standardized procedures. Such collaboration among agencies provided the combined benefits of coordinating the data to perform seamlessly across jurisdictional boundaries and supporting the cross-checking of land use data against other regional layers such as site addresses, owner names and property classes, etc. Leveraging limited budgets together enabled the collection and maintenance of a much larger quantity of data at a significantly lower cost, compared to a more fragmented approach of each agency acting independently.

Similar gains came from private partnerships. Midway through the project, staff sub-contracted the automated tool development tasks to a highly capable spatial ETL software vendor, adept with extracting, transforming and loading spatial data, and accustomed to rapid applications development. Detailed technical specifications from the CIBL project consultant guided application development by the software consultant and provided the City with means to measure and incorporate congruent analysis scenarios underway with Track One. By collaborating with the software vendor, analysis variations could take form as distinct parameters (published parameters) rather than distinct applications. Having both vendors under contact provided sufficient technical depth to address the functional requirements and presented opportunities to leverage specific technical strengths.

Almost immediately upon completion of the tools for the CIBL project, staff was asked to extend Track Two scope of work and develop a residential buildable lands inventory (R-BLI). The request was significant, as the two inventories require different input parameters, constraint parameters and classification procedures. At this point, the benefits of working with the two vendors became obvious. The planning consultant provided updated documentation, and the spatial ETL software consultant modified the original tools and published parameters to choose between R-BLI and CIBL.  An outcome of working directly with the software vendor’s staff and the local consultant was the ability to run the R-BLI analysis in less than a week.

In summary, Track Two involved four contracts, three GIS staff (allocated at approximately .33 FTE respectively), four public agencies, three private consultants and significant risk. The applications development project came in 35% under budget. The contract with the planning firm came in 13% under budget; the land use update project was 24% under budget and the ortho imagery project closed out on budget. Overall, Track Two reached successful completion at 19% under budget and most elements finished ahead of schedule. Some elements required extensions to synchronize activities with Track One. The risk associated with synchronizing analysis and applications development resulted in solid benefits to Track One.

Project deliverables met Track One needs and went on to support subsequent work. The stored procedures have reduced processing time from several weeks to several hours, have been used several times since completion and have reduced administrative overhead. The ortho imagery supported land use validation work and the updated land use data informed the BLI inventories. As mentioned, the City deployed Track Two deliverables, in some cases ahead of schedule, to support Track One in progress. Project deliverables continue to support priority work such as the Glenwood Refinement Plan and the Transportation System Plan.

Stored procedures accommodate three basic areas of analysis 1) developing the land base, 2) applying constraints and 3) classifying the results. Published parameters, set by the operator, affect Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan) Diagram, constraints and spatial extents (clip boundary). As stakeholders interpret and apply policy, adjustments occur to the published parameters. Each iteration results in new outputs. Archival data consists of sliced-up taxlots and complex geometries while publication data contains whole taxlots (simpler geometries) with attributes that indicate the amount of constrained area. As each BLI is point-in-time specific, the procedures support clear snapshots and, over time, temporal views of buildable land in Springfield.

In conclusion, risk-wise strategies can pay off. The success of the project is attributed to 1) strong collaboration, cooperation and coordination, 2) excellent service providers that became extensions of the internal team, 3) prudent adaptive management practices, 4) tempered flexibility and 5) access to highly skilled professionals.

Authors: Brandt Melick is GIS Program Supervisor, Tom Laird is GIS Database Administrator, and Mike Engelmann is GIS Analyst, and all are with the city of Springfield, Oregon.

Extended team of consultants and agencies: Safe Software, Inc., Surrey, Canada; ECONorthwest, Inc., Eugene, OR; City of Eugene; Lane County;  and Land Council of Governments.

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