NEARC Fall 2015

Dale Abbott*, VHB Steven Anderson*, VHB

Within the State of New Hampshire, Eversource holds fee to hundreds of parcels, comprising thousands of acres throughout the State. To serve its business needs it has become necessary to map and retain data for each parcel to be used as a land management tool. Under contract to Eversource, VHB developed a GIS based, parcel inventory for approximately 900 Fee-owned parcels held by Eversource. Eversource maintains real estate records for all of their Fee-owned parcels, but prior to the project, did not maintain any spatial information (CAD/GIS mapping) associated with each property. The project team identified the New Hampshire’s Parcel Mosaic Database (Parcel Mosaic), which was recently released by the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration as a public dataset, as the primary source for the missing spatial information. VHB validated and cleaned the real estate database to link the database to the Parcel Mosaic. The majority of the real estate listing linked to the Parcel Mosaic. For the remaining properties, VHB acquired hardcopy tax maps and digitized the boundaries, yielding a complete Fee-owned parcel layer. With parcel boundaries established and linked to the real estate database, the project team enhanced the database by collecting tax property cards for each parcel. Key attributes, such as the legal reference (County Book & Page), Map/Lot, Land Use Description, Assessed Land Area, Etc., were extracted from the property cards. In addition, a physical copy of the card was hyperlinked to the digital parcel layer, as well as a direct web link to the property card for those communities with online assessing records. In addition to producing a File Geodatabase to house the inventory and desktop GIS mapping, VHB generated an ArcGIS Online web mapping application to track and collect the property cards as well as extending access of the data to non-GIS users, such as staff from the Eversource’s Real Estate group.