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Chairperson Rick Person called the meeting to order at 1:50 p.m. at the Metropolitan Council Offices in St.
Paul.
Members present: Cities: Chairperson Rick Person (City of St. Paul), Private Research: Kent Treichel (Wilder
Foundation); Counties: Jane Harper, (Washington County) Metropolitan: Michael Munson (Metropolitan Council); Academic:
Will Craig (UM CURA) and State: Tom Eiber (DNR Forestry)
Members absent: State: Don Yaeger (LMIC); Cities: Judie Erickson (City of St. Louis Park); Metropolitan: Kathy
Johnson (Metropolitan Council) Marcel Jouseau (Metropolitan Council), Marcia Broman, (Metropolitan 911 Board), Nancy
Pollock, (Metropolitan 911 Board); Utilities: Dale Nikkola (Anoka Electric Cooperative); Counties: David Claypool
(Ramsey County); Tim Zimmerman (Hennepin County), John Connelly (St. Paul & Ramsey County Charter Commissions);
Cities: Roger Carlson (City of Minneapolis); School Districts: Robert D. Nelson (Richfield Public Schools)
Visitors: Rick Gelbmann, Metropolitan Council GIS Coordinator; David Arbeit, MetroGIS Coordinating Committee
Chairperson; Randall Johnson, MetroGIS Staff Coordinator
Support Staff: David Vessel; Heidi Welsch
2. Accept Agenda
The agenda was accepted as presented with the exception that Item 3. (Approval the Meeting Summary for April
8th) was postponed to the next meeting.
4. Business Information Needs/Object Modeling Project
4a. Highest Priority Business Information Needs
David Arbeit and Will Craig summarized the findings of supplemental analysis they conducted since the April
8th Team meeting. David and Will noted they had looked more closely at how the top priority needs of the six functional
groups and the various organizational groupings compared to the top priority needs of the survey population as a whole.
Will reported that the top ten information needs for the entire population contained the top priority need of each of
the specialty groups, with the exception of the soils. Rick Gelbmann noted that the Metropolitan Council is developing
a regional soils database for its internal needs that it will share with MetroGIS participants.
After much discussion, the group concluded there appeared to be little benefit to narrowing the list of
information needs to a definitive top ten or fifteen. Rather, the group agreed that a better approach would be to
accept the weighted score ranking of the information needs on the basis of all respondents, as presented by Will and
David, and agreed that best short term approach would be to select 2-3 of them for further consideration based on
ability to relatively quickly develop a replicable methodology and produce tangible results.
Rick Gelbmann and Randall Johnson emphasized the need to develop a replicatable methodology so that resources
other than the Council's may be used. This would also allow simultaneous work on several of the high priority
information needs. They stated that it is unlikely that the Metropolitan Council has adequate resources and may not
have a business need to support the methodology for all of the high priority information needs. The group concurred
that development of a proven and replicable methodology would be in the best interests of MetroGIS and that this
resource issue needs to be brought to the attention of the Policy Board.
Jane Harper explained that Washington County is beginning a jurisdictional boundary correction program as one
of the projects in its Data and Cost Sharing Agreement with the Council. She suggested that the County's effort should
be coordinated with further work on the regional jurisdictional boundaries information need project. Randall Johnson
explained that, where possible, local initiatives with the same or similar information needs financed with Council
funds, are intended to be integrated into the regional effort.
4b. Strategy for Next Steps
Randall Johnson explained a conceptual methodology that the Project Management Team had discussed at its
meeting on April 10th. The objectives pertaining to closure of the Business Information Needs Project were explained to
be: 1) Examine each high priority information need in greater detail with the assistance of subject matter experts to
determine the best way to define them and to identify preferred data sources. Information gathered from the original
750+ information needs brainstorming sessions and from the information needs survey pertaining to update frequency,
source of information, and various other written statements will be incorporated into this examination; 2) Identify
suitable data sources, and; 3) Agree on specifications for desired data. In a subsequent phase, institutional and
technical obstacles to sharing the preferred data would be evaluated. An "information needs work group" would be
created for each high priority information need to work through the methodology for its assigned information need(s).
It was agreed that the "jurisdictional boundaries" information need (#47) would be the best candidate to
develop the suggested methodology. The reasoning was that "jurisdictional boundaries" is the highest ranked information
need, it appears to involve content issues that would substantively test the methodology, and the content issues do not
appear to be of a contentious type that would bog down refinement of the methodology.
Will Craig suggested that the Team should acknowledge and advertise the Council's recent investment in the
development of regional street centerline and soils databases. The group agreed that attention needs to called to these
efforts as early successes for MetroGIS and that they should be used to test the concept methodology for subsequent
tasks. The soils information need (#40) should be examined to determine the extent to which the new regional soils
database being assembled by the Council meets that need. Similarly, the regional street centerline database being
acquired by the Metropolitan Council and Mn/DOT from The Lawrence Group is expected to satisfy some portion of the
following information needs: street addresses (#42), where people live (#2), and highway/road networks (#27).
Finally, it was agreed that the methodology for each high priority information need should be comprise of
following tasks.
- Better define information need [expanded data content team].
- Inventory and evaluate potential data sources [expanded data content team].
- Identify obstacles to accessing data needed to answer information needs and possible ways to overcome them
[access and standards team].
- Select preferred sources [Policy Board].
- Develop and provide access to data [data producer or MetroGIS].
The Team agreed that work on Tasks 1 and 2 for the street and soils-related information needs should begin as
soon as the Tasks 1 and 2 have been completed for the "jurisdiction boundaries" need, rather than wait for work on
subsequent tasks to also be completed for the "jurisdiction boundaries" need.
Finally, the team discussed which information needs to tackle after these first three but could not reach
consensus. The group did concur that it would prefer early examination of at least one information need that requires
data collected from individual cities or counties and that the two highest ranking information needs that meet this
criterion that seem to be doable are land use plans (#10) and parcel boundaries (#48). It was agreed that the Policy
Board or Coordinating Committee should choose which to pursue first.
7. Adjourn
The meeting adjourned at 4:15 PM. There was no discussion of Agenda Item 4c: May 22nd Presentation of Project
Findings; or Item 6: Date for the Team's June meeting.
Prepared by Randall Johnson, MetroGIS Staff Coordinator
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