County GIS team shows prototype water‑rights dashboard; developer removes misleading well‑count metric

County GIS staff and a developer demonstrated a working prototype of a water‑rights and availability dashboard built to mirror the riverbank program’s inputs and to present reach‑level debits and credits in a visual, user‑friendly format. The developer said the tool is written in Python and can populate fields for parcels, convert gallons‑per‑day to cubic feet per second for consistency, and automatically fill the maximum allocation per parcel to avoid user data entry errors.

The team said they removed an earlier report field that showed an “estimated capacity for new exempt wells,” because that simple arithmetic number had been misinterpreted in early tests and could be misleading without qualification. The developer highlighted that the application will validate client inputs against the reach total and will prevent allocations that would exceed a reach’s capacity when tested.

Why it matters: The tool is intended to help county staff and the public visualize remaining allocations in each reach and to reduce data entry errors when staff process permit or change applications. Removing the raw ‘estimated exempt wells’ figure reduces the risk that users will conflate a simple mathematical reserve with an administratively vetted availability.

Next steps: GIS staff will continue development, add user documentation and standard operating procedures to make the tool trainable and maintainable, and run tests to ensure allocations cannot be entered that exceed reach capacity. Staff said they will also add alerts for reaches approaching thresholds and work on a plan for public‑facing reporting.