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A team of computer whizzes at Kennewick City Hall have created a website that gives new meaning to the slogan, "Let your fingers do the walking."
Virtual Kennewick is the latest -- a citizen-friendly feature to be added to the city's website at www.ci. kennewick.wa.us.
Want to know where the food banks are, or how close the sewer main is to your front door? The answers are as close as the computer screen, a keyboard and a mouse, says David Granata, a supervisor in the geographic information services division at city hall.
Virtual Kennewick provides information in a visual map format, but in far greater detail than what typically can be found on city road maps folded and tucked inside a car's glove box.
Granata and his four GIS technical staff spent half a year getting the website ready to roll out two months ago. But the gathering of GIS data began 20 years ago by digitizing site plans, aerial photographs and surveys of building and streets. Other public agencies also provided similar data to help fill out the big picture.
The basic idea is to take a map of the city and overlay many layers of data onto it, Granata explained.
The result is a spatial display, or map, of data based on the city's records, maps and technical drawings.
Everything from city parks, libraries and other public facilities to locating street corners and fire hydrants is part of Virtual Kennewick.
"Everything has a database behind it," Granata said, adding that his staff update the data daily, if necessary, to keep the website current.
"We want to showcase what the city has to offer," Granata said, and that means Virtual Kennewick is going where few other government agency websites have gone.
Benton County and the city of Richland have maps online, and Franklin County offers a user-interactive website, but Virtual Kennewick is an attempt to put all the data in front of the public and then allow the public to have control in searching that data.
"We want people to be able to get the view they want," he said.
Virtual Kennewick also is a good thing for city hall, he said.
"There's a thrust at the city to make things more efficient to the public, to offer more self-service. We get a lot of requests for public information from developers and engineering design groups. The website can provide that," Granata said. That means city staff aren't involved and have more time to do their other duties, he explained.
"People are able to do it themselves. It saves our staff a lot of time," said Mitch Lepka, a GIS analyst and senior staff supervisor in the department.
Virtual Kennewick is designed to be a one-size-fits-all concept. It is both simple and intuitive enough to be useful for someone relatively inexperienced in online computing, yet customizable for people who are knowledgeable about downloading data files and manipulating them with other software applications, Granata said.
The challenge was to create a Virtual Kennewick that would be useful and not so detailed it would be overwhelming, Granata said.
Eventually, the website will become a two-way data highway, where visitors to Virtual Kennewick will be able to report information back to the city.
"We'd like to get to the point where people can report a pothole problem in addition to getting public records and doing business (with the city) from home," Granata said.
