Esri UC featured dozens of case studies on GIS, but the City of Rancho Cucamonga was one of the highlights.
One of the best stories of the Esri Plenary Session comes from the city of Rancho Cucamonga. Rancho Cucamonga is suburb of San Bernardino County, California, which has a population of about 165,000. To meet the needs of citizens, the city launched an aggressive campaign deploy GIS applications across the entire city. That’s why this year the city was recognized with Esri’s prestigious Presidents Award.
“GIS is mission critical to the city of Rancho Cucamonga, not a few people, a couple of departments, but everyone,” said Rancho Cucamonga City Manager John Gillison.
Gillison provided context on many of the GIS applications created for the city. The city leverages an internal cloud-based portal that allows all Rancho Cucamonga employees to access content, anytime and anywhere. “It’s our one stop shop for GIS,” explained Gillison.
The city also is able to connect field workers, and uses ArcGIS Collector to connect field crews and public works to update safety hazards in real-time. Data can be imputed with smartphones and tablets, and automatically synced back to a dashboard.
At Esri’s UC, government agencies are challenged to be “architects of the future” for their community. This means building more resilient communities – or communities that can quickly adapt to changes in the economy, environment and still continue to drive improved services for citizens. Gillison highlighted a great GIS application that is helping the city be architects for their future, and become more resilient to the challenges presented by working in local government.
“This next app is one I am really proud to unveil here at the conference, it’s our public facing live, work and locate app for economic development. This app helps Rancho Cucamonga employees attract new businesses and people to our community by highlighting key features such as traffic counts and existing businesses,” said Gillison.
An additional application that Gillsion shared provides a pulse of the city in real time. Built in-house, the dashboard provides a common operational picture of the city, and can help keep track on what is happening within the city. Everything from public works, emergencies, and traffic can be viewed in real-time to help manage a city, and take necessary action or inform improved policy decisions.
Rancho Cucamonga also has a real-time fire operations dashboard, which allows their fire chief to see when emergency calls are happening, and important information about incidents and data on response vehicles.
The final app that Gilison shared was the military banner app. “We are particular proud of [the military banner app] because of the stories that it tells, at each point there is the location of a military banner located in Rancho Cucamonga along with a picture of one of our local heroes, so that anyone can easily find them and we can all show our respect for these brave soldiers,” said Gillison.
Rancho Cucamonga is a fantastic example of a local government leveraging GIS to transform their community, and how GIS touches so many different parts of a community.
“What I have shared today is really just the tip of the iceberg of what we do, these apps are great, but what I think we are most proud of is that everyday we find a new way to use GIS to make Rancho Cucamonga a better place,” said Gillison.
The Rancho Cucamonga case study is just one small part of what was a fantastic Plenary at Esri UC.
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