Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks

First established in 1889, City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (LARAP) maintains and operates over 400 parks and facilities, including swimming pools, golf courses, recreation centers, museums, and child-care centers. Its mission is to enrich the lives of Los Angeles residents by providing safe, welcoming, and affordable recreational parks and facilities. LARAP depends on over 8,000 employees and roughly the same number of volunteers.

Prior to June 2007, LARAP did not have any internal GIS databases or applications. The initial need for GIS arose after ongoing challenges with the allocation of park-development fees collected from real estate developers. With the number of collections at an all-time high, LARAP's method of manually allocating money to parks in a defined proximity to the real estate developments became infeasible. So the Department set about implementing an internal web-based GIS from the ground up.

It took approximately one year for LARAP to verify the legal boundaries for their 400-plus parks and to enter them into a new ESRI-based geodatabase. Once this was complete and all of their data was accurate, they built a system using ArcGIS Server that could aggregate existing park-development fee collections for any given park. However, this system required a GIS specialist to administer it and what LARAP really needed was a way for their end users, who have little GIS exposure, to perform the analysis themselves.

After considering a variety of solutions, LARAP opted to complement ArcGIS Server with Geocortex Essentials for two core reasons: 1) it gave end users the power to act on their own, and 2) it simplified site maintenance for administrators. "The web-based applications developed using Geocortex Essentials have empowered our users to perform GIS analysis without having to use any desktop GIS tools," observes Flora Chang, Director of Systems at LARAP, who is in charge of the Department's information technology, including GIS. "We saved money on software licensing and training while providing users a flexible tool to meet their business needs."

Despite the comprehensive feature set that comes with Geocortex Essentials, LARAP required some customization to complete their workflow needs. For these, they contracted with NorthSouth GIS, a California-based firm and Geocortex implementation partner. One of the features developed for LARAP was a custom tool that combines data from ArcGIS Server and a SQL Serverbased financial tracking system to generate financial reports on funds available for park development and new land acquisition. These reports are wrapped in a REST API so they can be called from the Geocortex Essentials client API user interface (map) or from a plain HTML page (no map). In addition to these custom reports, custom searches and a modified zoom-to-extent tool were also developed.

One of the most popular features of LARAP's new web-based GIS is the ability for users to share sessions and preserve the current state of a map, including any graphics, markup, and the map extent. This allows users to collaborate on ideas for park development and enhancement designs in ways that were not possible before.

Despite its success, the project was not completed without challenges, primarily due to financial constraints. "We have a shoe-string budget," notes Chang, "and we use it to pay for development as well as to accommodate any last-minute GIS requests. We are fortunate that the people at NorthSouth GIS are very understanding and have always worked within budget constraints."

The pilot version of LARAP's GIS application was deployed in July 2009 and the production version was implemented two months later. Future plans include its integration with external systems for real estate and facilities management. LARAP would also like to enable web-based editing of facility locations and integrate the Pictometry viewing component.

Overall, the staff at the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks are very pleased with their new GIS. "We've come a long way in the last two years," explains Chang, "We've made the transition from having no GIS, using paper maps and spreadsheets, to an integrated and flexible web-based GIS that allows users to make business decisions based on land-based analysis along with real-time financial data."

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