OAK HILL — A map of Oak Hill’s street sweeper routes, floodplains, planned road paving projects and much more could one day be only a mouse click away. Town officials announced plans Wednesday to build a geographic information system (GIS) for Oak Hill, which they hope will amount to better planning and increased transparency.

Town manager Bill Hannabass says the GIS is a way to store and access information in a more logical way than is currently possible.

“Most of us are familiar with a Google map,” he says. “That’s how it starts out. Over top you’ll see layers of information.”

Other possible information layers for Oak Hill’s GIS include the location of motor vehicle accidents, fire hydrants, street lights, handicap parking spots and snow plow routes. Each department will someday have its own layer on the map.

Once information is uploaded to the system, town employees and residents can access it via Internet browsers, handheld devices, smart phones or some future technology.

“This is the way of the future,” says Hannabass. “The county got on board with it a while back. I’m proud to follow them as the first municipality in the county, and one of the only ones in the state with GIS.”

While some of the information will be publicly available, other layers will be hidden from view and used solely by law enforcement or city employees. For example, details about the city’s sewer system will be for in-house viewing only, because the infrastructure is seen by some as a potential target for terrorists.

Hannabass also says information that would “compromise your privacy” will not be publicly available.

The town’s initial investment in the GIS will be $16,000 to cover costs of a computer, software, and initial setup. From that point, each additional layer comes with an associated price tag — in the case of the sewer system, around $150,000. Less complicated layers will cost less. Rather than one line item, the cost is shared by several departments.

Among the first layers created will be vacant property registration, to assist in administration of a new Oak Hill ordinance that requires property owners to pay graduated fees when a building sits empty.

Ken Casto of Thrasher Engineering, a Charleston firm contracted to create the GIS, is overseeing the work. He says in future phases, the town’s new code enforcement officer, Pfc. Abbie Greenwood, will use the information to go out and check the vacant properties. Greenwood’s other duties in her new position include enforcement of city code and administration of the vacant structures program.

Tony Simental, state GIS coordinator, says when Hannabass first told him that the GIS administrator would be a police officer, he was confused, but now he believes it makes good sense. In his former position as engineering technician for the City of Huntington, he says he ran into problems administering the building code.

“The problem was, we were civilians, so when we showed up at homes, we had to also call the police because we had no arresting power,” he says, congratulating the town on its decision to fill the position laterally.

Simental says it will save money on personnel and enhance communication between city departments by centralizing information in one database.

The Fayette County Tax Assessor offers its data on property to the municipality at no charge. The county assessor’s office already established a publicly accessible GIS for property records and tax information in the county. Residents can search the records by going to www.fayetteassessor.com/search.

Other base layers are accessible for free from the state.

Hannabass hopes the GIS will assist him with records management, maintenance of infrastructure and planning.

“Once you get the map, you can do a better job planning,” he says. “It will tell us when it’s time to replace a sewer line, repave a street, or replace a drainage line. It will help us plan police protection by identifying areas that have drug activity, high motor vehicle accidents, or high property damage.

“You can be proactive because of the GIS system.”

His list of desired layers is still a work in progress. The sewer layer alone will contain perhaps a dozen classes of information, like depth and material of existing sewer pipe. Hannabass says few maps of the town’s sewer currently exist, and much of the knowledge is simply passed down from department head to department head. It recently took town workers several days to locate a manhole in the town’s system.

Though it could take a decade or more to build a robust database of information, Hannabass believes the tool will be worth the work and investment in the long term.

“This will change the face of the way the city of Oak Hill does business,” says Hannabass. “I’m going to be a much more efficient administrator, which equates with more efficient service for the people in Oak Hill.”

No timeline has yet been established for the project, says Hannabass, who is currently undergoing training on the GIS himself.

— E-mail: cmoore@register-herald.com