Most Barrington-area residents look at their block and see beautiful homes, large trees and closely cropped lawns bordering a quiet residential street.
But area planners envision a time when they can reduce the rolling countryside and quaint villages of the entire Barrington area to a $200,000, multicolored, computerized grid called a geographic information system.
Earlier this month, Gov. Jim Edgar approved a new state budget that included $100,000 for Barrington to start implementing such a system. The amount is half what Barrington officials requested, said Mayor Ronald Hamelburg.
Still, local officials were elated that the state was sending them money for the project, which Barrington will share throughout the four-county area.
“It’s got fantastic potential,” said Donald Klein, executive director of the Barrington Area Council of Governments, which is composed of seven towns including Barrington. “It’s great for BACOG, for Barrington and the school district.”
The state funds put Barrington, a community of fewer than 10,000, in a technological league with larger governmental entities such as Lake County, which has been mapping its territory with a geographic information system for several years, and Cook County, which has started a multimillion-dollar project to install a similar system, according to the Northern Illinois Planning Commission.
In essence, the system shows a to-scale computer model of a town map. It can show an aerial photograph of each block as well as the topography, real estate plats, zoning, utilities and transportation routes. It also indicates which residences have septic systems and which households have school-age children.
“It usually takes years before you really start to benefit from such systems because it just takes a lot of work to get (the databases) built,” said Barrington Village Manager Robert Irvin, who worked with a mapping system when he was the administrator of St. Peters, Mo.
Although Barrington will be able to borrow databases already created by Lake and Cook Counties, much of the information will have to be collected and put into the computer by Barrington village staffers, Hamelburg said.
“It’s going to take more legwork than money, and a lot of manpower to enter the data,” Hamelburg said.
Once it is put together, a geographic information system can be an invaluable tool, say planners who have used it.
Planners at NIPC used to draw maps showing zoning, transportation routes, utilities or topography, all on huge, separate overlays, said Max Dieber, director of research services at NIPC.
Any alteration, such as a zoning change, required all the maps to be redrawn.
“That might take two weeks to put together,” Dieber said. “Now it is just a matter of minutes.”
Naperville began building its own information system three years ago, and now it shows real estate outlines, roads, sidewalks, buildings, streams and other natural features, said Larry Gunderson, the city’s geographic information system manager. It took two years to collect the information, he said.
The necessary software and hardware, which is available from several computer companies, used to cost millions of dollars, preventing smaller municipalities from buying it, said Gunderson. But costs have dropped and more towns are able to take advantage of it, he said.
“It’s one of those things that has been a quiet revolution that has been going on behind the scenes,” Gunderson said.
