State geospatial office demos redistricting tools built for school-mapping and Act 73

John Adams, director of the Center for Geographic Information at the Agency of Digital Services, demonstrated a suite of public mapping tools intended to support school redistricting and the work of the Act 73 task force. Adams said the center publishes foundational spatial datasets — aerial imagery, elevation and statewide tax-parcel data — and builds web applications so stakeholders can visualize and export district scenarios.

The tools include a district builder that uses towns as the base unit, a School Explorer with multiple overlay layers and a DriveTime Explorer that estimates student counts within configurable drive-time rings. "We build those foundational datasets, what we call our spatial data infrastructure," Adams said. He noted many datasets are federated from municipal, regional and state sources and the work is openly…