Davidson County to replace two-decade-old public GIS viewer; new mobile‑friendly site to launch Oct. 15

Jason Clodfelter, Davidson County’s GIS manager, told commissioners on Oct. 2 that the county plans to replace its long-running public GIS viewer with a modern, responsive web application and tentatively scheduled a public launch for Oct. 15.

Why change is needed Clodfelter said the current public viewer is built on backend software that went out of vendor support in July, creating maintenance limits and a potential IT security risk. The county migrated many internal users to a newer desktop platform and is moving more applications to ArcGIS Online. Clodfelter said roughly 30 internal staff use desktop GIS while the county now supports about 45 web applications, up from fewer than 10 about 18 months ago.

New features and rollout The new application, built on a web template provided under the county’s existing contract with Avineon Incorporated, will be responsive to phones and tablets and will keep the county from maintaining a separate mobile site. Clodfelter said the new viewer will add data layers and search tools: an address-point layer (to find individual mobile homes or apartment units), an exportable “qualified sales” layer with sales since 2022 to help the tax revaluation process, and advanced parcel search and export functions for internal and public users. The county plans three public training/demonstration sessions Oct. 17, 20 and 23, plus a help PDF to be published with the press release.

Cost Clodfelter said the upgrade will be performed under the county’s existing GIS managed-services contract with Avineon at no additional software licensing cost; because the county already pays the contract, the new template and ongoing vendor updates are covered by the current agreement.

Support and next steps Clodfelter thanked the IT team, and in particular Daniel Parrish, for server and infrastructure work. He said the county has completed major back‑end upgrades (new GIS-specific servers, centralized data storage and automation of monthly update processes) and brought maintenance of next‑generation 9‑1‑1 addressing back in-house. The county will run the new and old viewers in parallel through the end of the year and retire the old viewer thereafter.

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