Douglas County GIS manager highlights GeoPortal, address database and emergency mapping role

Tyler Fleming, GIS manager, told the commission the county’s GeoPortal (dgcoks.gov/geoportal) launched last summer and provides publicly available web applications and aerial imagery. He said the county has four full‑time GIS professionals and maintains an enterprise GIS with on‑premises servers and a cloud environment.

Fleming emphasized the operational data GIS maintains: he said the county keeps roughly "62,000 address points," road centerlines and thousands of common places used by dispatchers. He explained that common places — named locations such as businesses or landmarks — allow 911 dispatch to route first responders when a caller gives a place name rather than a numeric street address.

On imagery, Fleming said Douglas County participates in statewide orthorectified aerial imagery collected every two years and buys out higher resolution imagery for local use; oblique photos are collected on a staggered schedule so the county receives new imagery annually in alternating products.

Fleming described GIS’s role in emergency operations: live Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) feeds and GIS dashboards help emergency management and public information officers track incidents, allocate resources and generate maps for public communications during events such as grass fires or tornado response. He said GIS tools were critical during the county’s response and recovery from an F4 tornado and are used by the sheriff’s office and fire district for response routing.

Commissioners and staff asked about planned overlays and future analytic work; Fleming said the GIS team will work with the county’s Power BI/data warehouse work to overlay socioeconomic, health and service data for decision support and to show how county dollars are being spent.

No formal decisions were made; the presentation emphasized data infrastructure and operational support for public safety and planning.