BY THE NUMBERSHere are the Georgia counties taking part or considering taking part in the mapping effort:County / Area in square milesDade / 174Catoosa / 163Chattooga / 314Walker / 447Gordon / 358Source: www.georgia.gov
By Ben Benton
And Mike Chambers
Correspondent
Sometime this winter, digital cameras inside a twin-engine aircraft will document the terrain of Northwest Georgia.
The aerial photography mission will update maps used by tax assessors, planners and emergency personnel, officials say.
The Dade County Commission has approved $18,000 in special purpose local option sales tax money to join Gordon County in the aerial mapping update, officials said. Walker, Catoosa and Chattooga counties also are considering joining the effort.
Aerial photography has been used since the 1970s for county assessments, Dade County Executive Ted Rumley said, usually every five to eight years.
The last Dade flyover was in 1998 or 1999, and “we’re overdue now,” he said.
“You pick up so much” from a flyover, Rumley said, from “tracts of timber that have been cut, [to] growth that hasn’t been reported; houses, barns.”
The images, produced by the James W. Sewall Co. of Maine, will be “very accurate photography, both horizontally and vertically” to account for the curvature of the Earth, company spokesman Randy Myers said. The maps should be accurate to within a foot, he said.
The $500,000 camera system will record a gigabyte of visual data per minute of flight, Myers said, and the entire flight over Dade County should take about a day.
The new digital maps are expected to be of particular interest for tax assessments, but the photos could give information on other county concerns such as hidden landfills and dumps. That makes the data useful in the county codes office, too, Rumley said.
Information on streets, homes and fire hydrants could be downloaded to emergency responders’ laptops, he said.
Myers said search-and-rescue workers have benefited from the maps, in some cases even finding hunters who have fallen from trees.
The maps will be well detailed, he said, but people shouldn’t get nervous about “Big Brother.”
“You’ll be able to see a truck, but you won’t be able to tell if it’s a Dodge or a Chevy,” he said.
Takeoff is scheduled for the first of February when visibility is highest, Rumley said.
Walker County Coordinator David Ashburn said county leaders have not yet signed a contract with the company. Officials are looking for grants and hope to trim costs by going in on the project with the other counties.
Pricing is based in part on the physical area of the county, but costs are not certain until it’s known how many counties are participating, Ashburn said. At 447 square miles, Walker has the largest land area in Northwest Georgia.
Walker has not updated its maps in almost seven years, he said. The new information would update the geographic information system maps on the county website, he said.
Catoosa County Clerk Melissa Hannah said county commissioners will decide in November whether to join the effort. She estimated the cost at $15,000 to $20,000.
Catoosa’s maps last were updated five years ago, Hannah said.
The maps are useful to public works, stormwater, planning and zoning officials, “and, of course, the citizens,” she said.
“Just about every project we work on, [engineers and managers] want GIS data,” she said.