Municipal Monitor - May/June 2008 - (Page 12)

“With a little partnership, you can actually make a difference.” or hazardous materials areas within a one-kilometre range of a particular water intake,” he says. “In about four or five minutes we can pull up all the information and give them a list.” For internal operations, “We can bring up mailing lists. We can notify property owners of different threats. We’re starting to use it for emergency management, locating and notifying the public of where emergency shelters are located and planning out evacuation routes for forest fires, floods and winter storms,” he continues. “It’s great, because we use a software that’s fairly standard throughout the industry, so You know where you want to go. Get there with our expertise in advocacy, corporate, property and government law. Call us to learn more about our municipal law team. George Rust-D’Eye, Partner 416.947.5080 grustdeye@weirfoulds.com Finish ahead. WeirFoulds Protect your future. Gain a strategic advantage. WeirFoulds LLP. www.weirfoulds.com we can co-ordinate with other organizations like the Ministry of Natural Resources.” “Virtually any data that we have, about anything, we can load it into the system,” says Wray. “So one of the things we’re looking at is registration of dogs. Somebody comes in and registers a dog and fills out a form, so we take a picture of that dog and it’s a quick reference, for example, on a dog bite report. Because the dog has a home, we can attach all that information on the Information System. At the beginning of next year, we can send out reminders to everybody, and if somebody loses their dog, we can check the picture,” he points out. NITGC also streamlines major construction projects like street redevelopment. “We scanned in all the engineering plans that we had, and all those are attached from a hyperlink perspective to each area,” Wray says. This means that engineers and other information users can click on a particular map area with a mouse to see an overlay of all the engineering plans pertaining to a given site. “Or let’s say the local Economic Development Corporation was entertaining someone who wanted to locate a business. We can show them all the properties with the appropriate zoning. You can do any query related to any asset or any property related to the municipality,” he says. In yet another example, “When we do a rezoning change, we have to mail out the information to all the property owners,” Wray continues. “Normally we would have to get a map and look up all the owners. Now we just set up a little query in the system and ask the system to give us the name and address of every property owner in the municipality, and it can be merged with a mail program so it just spits the letters out. A process that used to take one person municipal 304567_weir.indd 1 12 · MONITOR 1/2/07 9:20:08 AM May/June 2008 http://www.weirfoulds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Municipal Monitor - May/June 2008

Municipal Monitor - May/June 2008 Contents President's Message: On Messages and Milestones Viewpoint: Much Ado About Nothing? Again Mapping the North: Municipalities Team Up to Create Sophisticated Geographic Information System The Clean Water Act: Let's Make it Perfectly Clear Developing Trend: Communication is Essential During Large-Scale Projects Water Under the Bridge Municpal Memos Index to Advertisers

Municipal Monitor - May/June 2008

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