The Nobleboro Board of Selectmen voted to move forward with the creation of Geographic Information System (GIS) maps of the town at their Feb. 17 meeting.
GIS maps are interactive digital maps that give information on locations, property owners and zoning information.
In Nobleboro, they will be compiling all the information from the tax maps of the town and creating a digital map that can be overlaid with new information, such as shoreland zoning and other resource management information.
The project will cost $3600 in town funds, and has already been done by many other towns in Lincoln County, Selectman Deb Wilson said at the meeting.
“Eventually, we’ll be able to put the map on our website for anyone to use to get information about property in Nobleboro,” Wilson said.
The information on the maps will likely include lot owner, address, tax assessed value and book and page location at the registry of deeds, Wilson said.
The GIS maps will be made by Rory Craib, a professional land surveyor at Maine Coast Surveying in Damariscotta, Wilson said. Craib has made tax maps – and more recently GIS maps – for towns around Lincoln County for more than 30 years.
“More and more towns are going towards digital tax maps,” Craib said. “For me, it’s a matter of convenience. Updating digital maps is faster and more accurate than doing it by hand.”
While most towns have digitized their tax maps, few towns have taken the next step to create GIS on top of those maps.
The difference between a digital map and a GIS is that GIS layers several different types of information together and allows users to see how those different types of information relate to one another.
The real value of a GIS system is that it can interpret data, Craib said.
“Almost any question you can dream up to ask a GIS, if you have the right data, you can get an answer,” Craib said.
As an example, Craib said that when the GIS maps of Nobleboro are complete, one could search the map for every lot that fronts on Damariscotta Lake that’s larger than 10 acres.
“You can always get more specific,” he said. “You can limit those results by the number of buildings on the property or amount of wetlands on the lot.”
If the maps of Nobleboro are on the town’s website, they will be available for anyone to access. The only town in Lincoln County that currently has GIS maps on their website is Westport Island, Craib said.
“As I understand, it was done as sort of a demonstration that this was possible,” Craib said.
Westport Island’s GIS maps, created a little over a year ago, are available on their website at www.westportisland.us under the “Digital Tax Maps and GIS” link.
The information provided on the GIS includes tax maps, property values, wetland designations and trail sites. It can be searched in many ways, including lot owner, lot size, and map and lot number.
Wilson and fellow board member Henry Simmons both voted to begin work on the project. Selectman Dick Spear was not in attendance.
