Geographic Information Systems have been in use in various larger municipalities in Northern Ontario for the last five or six years. They have been implemented to increase efficiencies in capital planning, zoning, permits and maintenance, as well as planning in the areas of Health, Education and Lifestyle. While smaller municipalities could also realize the increased taxpayer service benefits of GIS, implementation for small municipalities has been cost prohibitive.

Blue Sky Net attempted to initiate a regional GIS project through the Provincial GeoSmart program in 2003, but was unsuccessful. In the fall of 2005 five local municipalities approached BSN regarding revitalizing this project. Towards the end of 2005 FedNor announced major programs for broadband infrastructure and application development, and contracted BSN to deliver these programs in the districts of Nipissing, Parry Sound, Sudbury, Manitoulin and Algoma as well as some townships in the Muskoka District.

All five of the original municipalities as well as six adjacent municipalities partnered in a GIS Strategic Plan to define their objectives and priorities as they related to GIS.  Since this time, additional municipalities have indicated an interest in joining the partnership to implement a regional GIS solution. Blue Sky Net has taken the lead in this project and is providing valuable project coordination/management services on behalf of the now 17 partnering municipalities.  The partners are currently finalizing a Memorandum of Understanding to guide the implementation of Blue Sky Municipal Geographic Information System Partnership.

Municipalities in Northern Ontario are faced with the double challenge of satisfying a need for data and information from a wide variety of requesters (internal staff, councillors, investors, business people, officials from other levels of government, the media, social service organizations, the general public) and doing so from a widely disparate collection of data sets (tax rolls, zoning records, inspection data, various local inventories, etc.). The proposed Geographic Information System will simplify both of these challenges. Through a process of integration and automation, GIS will set up and deliver a set of “views” that customize the presentation of information to the specific needs, interests and capabilities of different groups of users. On the supply side, it will provide tools to integrate and store disparate data sets, allowing them to interact in a mutually supporting and synergistic manner.

There are several advantages to this approach. Municipal information will become more accessible and more useful. Integration will deliver powerful tools that allow for comparability and synergy. Data collection and storage will benefit from the rule of diminishing costs for the community and will develop a single large and ever-growing system composed of numerous integrated data sets that are shared by all stakeholders. Each new application will be built on the infrastructure of the previous applications. Once a base system is in place and being maintained on an ongoing basis, partners such as municipal officials, health units, conservation authorities, emergency workers, utility companies, real estate agents, economic developers and others will share in and draw from the same integrated data sets, thereby not only saving on costs but enhancing the functionality of their applications by invoking comparisons and associations among different data sets that would be impossible if the data were configured in separate silos.   

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