September 14, 2009 -- TAVARES, FLA. — The Lake County Department of Information Technology, Geographic Information Services (GIS) Division, recently added a new Public Works feature to its interactive mapping Web page ( http://gis.lakecountyfl.gov/gisweb/) that displays layers of street maintenance maps, vacation petitions, right of way and stimulus road projects.

“All of these layers, except for the stimulus road projects, have documents attached to them to assist with citizen requests for these documents,” said Kevin Willis, Director of the Lake County GIS Division. “We were also able to attach the subdivision plat book documents to our subdivisions layer for viewing on the Web map.”

The stimulus road project layer shows basic information on the projects, such as funds granted, which allows the public to pinpoint where these projects are taking place and how the County is utilizing federal stimulus funds.

The project was not a simple endeavor. The Lake County Department of Public Works, Right-of-Way Section, plotted, scanned and indexed 6,733 right-of-way deeds for the right-of-way layer, 1,170 documents for the vacation petition layer and 1,435 images for the maintenance maps.

“All this information is currently retrieved manually, and the Right-of-Way Section staff had been working for years to get this information into digital format, and then compiled into a digital mapping layer,” said Patti Harker, Lake County’s Right-of-Way Manager. “Thousands of hours of work went into getting this layer ready. This gives us the ability to pull up the plats and view them on the GIS online interactive map, which will be an added convenience for all.”

For more information or to schedule a demonstration on details of the Right-of-Way Layer, call Amanda Hull, Lake County Right-of-Way Agent, at (352) 483-9060 or e-mail Email Contact.

In addition to the Right-of-Way Section’s work, the Lake County Department of Information Technology, Programming & Application Support Services Division, assisted with the document management portion of the project.

For more information about the Lake County GIS Division, call (352) 343-9633 or log on to www.lakecountyfl.gov, keyword: GIS.