Chesterfield County planning staff demonstrate upgraded ELM portal and new Chevron app to improve public access to cases

Planning Department staff for Chesterfield County demonstrated an upgraded public-facing Enterprise Land Management (ELM) portal and a new “Chevron” map application during a Planning Commission meeting, explaining the tools are intended to make zoning, site-plan and subdivision case information easier for citizens and applicants to find.

Coral Sundar, information manager in the Planning Department, said the Chevron app displays pending and recently decided cases on a map and lists case numbers, brief descriptions, district, case type and current status. “This data that we are showing you gets updated every day at 8 AM. Every weekdays at 8 AM. So it is kind of a live data,” Sundar said.

The portal and app combine a map view with search and filter tools so users can search by case number, case name or sign number, filter by case type (for example, zoning, site plan, subdivision or variance), district, meeting date or case status and, in some views, see community meeting listings. Greg McIntyre, who presented the ELM navigation, walked commissioners through the record detail pages that contain applicant contacts, parcel IDs, condition lists and an attachments section with downloadable documents.

“The document names are highlighted in green. Those are the hyperlinks so you can easily click on it and it will automatically download it to your computer,” McIntyre said, describing how attachments are arranged and how columns can be sorted by upload date or name to find specific files.

Staff emphasized that documents published to Civic Clerk will appear in the Chevron app after publication. McIntyre also noted users can reach the ELM portal directly from the county website and use basic or filtered searches in ELM itself to list records by project name, record type or date range.

Commissioners responded with mostly praise and offered suggestions. Commissioner Hilton thanked staff for the work and noted difficulty citizens sometimes face locating older cases when they are filed under corporate applicant names rather than common project names; he suggested staff identify widely used public aliases and link them to case records. Dr. Lund and Commissioner Sloan echoed appreciation and suggested metadata improvements to make search results clearer, such as showing case names and numbers in search snippets and adding inline help for fields labeled “record number” or “record type.” Sundar said staff already have added some common names to newer cases and are working with information services technology (IST) on metadata changes.

Staff noted one feature is not yet complete: direct integration with the county GIS. Sundar said GIS linkage is planned for a next phase; currently the Chevron app connects into the ELM system and will list parcel IDs and the property owners associated with a zoning case but does not stream into the county GIS viewer.

Commissioners also discussed operational details that staff clarified in the meeting: the Chevron map shows cases pending and those with final action within the last three months; filters include community meetings and hearing-date filters for board and commission agendas; and the county sends a weekly active zoning case report distributed by staff member Kelly Hare.

The demonstration drew multiple questions and suggestions for incremental improvements; staff said they will continue refining search metadata, alias handling and user help materials and will work with IST on the integration and other enhancements.

Less-critical technical notes raised during discussion included adding explanatory “?” tooltips for record-number and record-type fields and considering a magistrate filter for internal users. No formal action, vote or policy change on the ELM or Chevron app was taken at the meeting.