High-quality aerial imagery brings city added $60K; webinar shows how

Located in low, gently rolling hills just north of Indianapolis, Carmel, Indiana is one of the fastest-growing communities in the country. It has nearly tripled in population since 2000 and now numbers 91,000 inhabitants.

Considering the growth expected for 2017 and 2018, the City of Carmel needed a visual tool better able to manage the city’s expansion projects across several government departments.

After years of using low-resolution aerial imagery provided by the county, the City of Carmel realized it needed something better for analyzing and displaying accurate information.

The Carmel Storm Water Department turned to Nearmap to provide high-quality aerial images that are frequently updated to integrate with its existing applications, including ArcMap and ArcGIS.

Nearmap now supplies the city with high-resolution imagery that aids data accuracy, verifies customer claims, educates developers, enforces compliance, and prepares presentations for internal government meetings. As an unexpected bonus, since implementing Nearmap, the department has collected $60,000 more in revenue in 2017.

Shane Burnham, a GIS technician, and John Thomas, storm water administrator, both with the City of Carmel Engineering Department, will give a presentation on the city’s use of aerial imagery in a webinar on Thursday, January 18.  The webinar is free, but attendees must pre-register.

Burnham provides GIS services for City of Carmel’s Engineering and Planning departments. He serves as departmental Cityworks Administrator and asset management specialist and has published custom GIS web applications during his career. Thomas focuses on impervious surface analysis using aerial imagery and GIS data in support of storm water administration and billing.

“Truth on the Ground is Best Seen from the Air: How aerial imagery is propelling government and commercial organizations to higher levels of operational efficiency” will also feature speakers from Black & Veatch, an engineering, consulting and construction company with more than 100 offices worldwide, specializing in infrastructure development in power, oil and gas, water, telecommunications, government, mining, data centers, smart cities and banking and finance markets; and from Nearmap, an international provider of high resolution aerial imagery.

Carmel Courthouse. (Photo: City of Carmel, Indiana.)

Carmel was named Number 1 among Niche’s “Best Places to Live in 2017”. Niche is a website that analyzes public data sets and reviews to produce rankings, report cards, and profiles for every K-12 school, college, and neighborhood in the U.S.

More about the free webinar:

Advances in aerial imagery including high-resolution maps and a streamlined process to capture, manage and deliver imagery in the cloud is transforming the way governments and businesses operate. In this webinar, you will:

• Learn about the latest advances in aerial imagery including how imagery is supporting a variety of government and business applications today.
• See real-world use cases of imagery in telecommunication, engineering and city government to improve operational efficiency.
• Understand how imagery can be used standalone and within GIS and CAD products.
• See the latest demos of Nearmap imagery including vertical, panorama and oblique views.