Bingham County, Idaho manages over 35,000 parcels that have to be maintained and updated on a daily basis. Information from several different departments are involved in the process: ownership information from the Assessors, boundaries from the Surveyors, tax information from the Treasurers, photographs from the Appraisers, district information from the Clerks; the list goes on and on. All of this information has to end up in one place – the County’s parcel dataset in GIS. When County GIS staff recognized the massive amount of time it would require to compile everything manually every day, they turned to Gateway Mapping Inc. (GMI) for an automated solution.

Using the Python scripting language along with Esri’s Python site package (arcpy), GMI staff created an automatic routine that gathers all of the needed information from various databases across the county, formats and standardizes the information, and produces a final completed parcel map ready for public use. In addition to adding ownership, assessment and appraisal information, along with current taxing data, instrument (deed) history and property photographs, the scripts created by GMI publish the data to the County’s public facing server resulting in automatic updates of the public maps accessible on the County’s website. By implementing these scripts, Bingham County staff save hours every day and now have more time to focus on more productive tasks.