City of Camas On-call GIS Services

The City of Camas, Washington, has a population of approximately 26,000 and borders both Vancouver and Washougal. Originally built around a paper mill, the City is committed to revitalizing its downtown while paying homage to its historic past. Today, Camas is a vibrant, walkable community that has maintained many of its historic buildings. 

FLO began working with the City to convert a backlog of CAD as-built data into GIS format to update the City’s understanding of its infrastructure and provide a single source of easily accessible data to staff. In addition to converting the data features and correctly locating them, FLO added attribution and topology checks to clean up gaps and correct unconnected lines and point features, thus improving the relationships between the features. FLO published these features to the City’s ArcGIS Online organization for staff to view, manage, and edit their data, primarily through web maps FLO created for each group of utilities the city manages: stormwater, water, and sanitary sewer. It’s worth noting that these data updates extend past City usage; the City submits these layers to Clark County to help update the county’s own GIS database. 

Over the years, FLO has continued to help the City keep its data up to date by processing new as-builts that include utility expansions brought about by new development as well as repairs and modifications to existing infrastructure. Additionally, FLO has refined existing data attribution with supplemental data provided by the City and has made schema updates to reflect internal data management practices specific to the City. Field crews also utilize the web maps FLO created to help monitor maintenance on their utility assets, like seeing when a hydrant was installed, the last time it was serviced, and if it's still in use or set to be retired. Additionally, FLO has been assisting the City with creating new CAD data standards for public requests and inquiries and evaluating new data management systems that integrate with GIS.