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Polk County demonstrates new Beacon GIS portal and previews NG911 and LIDAR upgrades
Summary
Polk County's GIS coordinator demonstrated the new Beacon portal, highlighting parcel search, survey and sales tools, spatial selection for 300-foot notifications, and restricted layers for sensitive data; staff reported about 65,000 visits and 2.6 million interactive requests since launch and previewed plans for 3-inch orthoimagery and a 2025 LIDAR viewer.
Bridal Runenberg, Polk County GIS Coordinator in the Land Information Office, demonstrated the county's new Beacon mapping portal, which replaced the previous WebGuideStream platform. "If you're on our main county website, you can just click on our maps ... and go to the Polk County interactive map right here," Runenberg said while walking the committee through search, report and mapping tools.
Runenberg showed parcel and survey functions (including tie-sheet and certified survey map lookups), advanced and sales search, printable reports, layer controls and spatial selection (a buffer tool suitable for creating 300-foot notification mailing lists). He noted the portal supports downloading results to Excel or mailing-label formats and that authorized accounts can view restricted emergency-management layers (pipeline locations, hazardous-material datasets) while the public sees non-sensitive layers.
Usage metrics presented by Runenberg indicate roughly 65,000 site visits and 2,600,000 interactive requests since the portal went live last December. Staff described planned improvements: fixes to some UI/scale tool issues, a new LIDAR viewer and collection of 2025 aerial imagery (upgrading from 6-inch to 3-inch resolution with partial grant funding to cover the difference). Committee members asked about printing, parcel-dimension completeness and how subaddress data from a recent GIS internship will be used to support NG911 dispatch systems.
Land Information management also described ongoing work to populate parcel dimensions and survey data and noted that some certified survey and surveyor-filed documents remain accessible through the surveyor index on the portal. Staff said they will continue to refine the portal and provide training resources and that some emergency-response datasets will remain restricted to authorized users to protect sensitive infrastructure information.
