Phone : 0800 470 3410
Phone : 0800 470 3410
MapEagle Helps Make the most of Manchester City Council’s Resources:
Times are hard in local government and authorities are finding that efficient use of officer time and integrated working are increasing important in making effective use of staff resources. Manchester City Council, believed that their Environmental Health based Contaminated Land Team was a valuable but under-utilised resource. In many authorities, departments such as the “Regeneration Department”, will use external consultants to undertake contaminated land desk studies from time to time. Meanwhile, within the Environmental Health Team there is often at least one contaminated land specialist working in-house. Increasingly, therefore, Environmental Health are using their own specialists to produce desk-studies for their own Part 2A work, but also exploring the possibility of advising other departments within the authority.
STM Environmental installed the ArcGIS MapEagle Extension at Manchester City Council in Spring 2011 and worked closely with officers in the contaminated land team to set up MapEagle. We were assisted considerably by the team’s own excellent template reports, created in anticipation of the exercise. MapEagle can now run all the spatial queries in GIS required to inform the desk studies and auto generate the maps and much of the text into a professional looking report within minutes. Once the bulk of information is produced in a draft “Word” document, specialist Contaminated Land Officers can review the reports, adding their own interpretative commentary where necessary to complete the study.
MapEagle does not eliminate the need for professional expertise in producing desk studies but it does reduce the time taken for the objective screening of GIS layers, collating all the maps and standard text into a professional looking report in minutes rather than hours, reducing errors and freeing valuable time for the specialist to get on with what he or she does best.