City of Monroe, LA

To perform our day-to-day functions we have full time survey crews and CAD draftsmen as well as a GIS specialist to assist the city engineer with street and driveway permitting and monitoring engineering and construction projects throughout the city.

We store and file all construction plans done in the city, perform topographic surveys and boundary surveys as well as provide technical information for large-scale drainage studies. From assisting the legal department with complex land transactions, drawing architectural building plans to setting elevations for drainage, we are involved in every aspect of the engineering field.

Land Surveying and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are acutely intertwined. Ground locations of infrastructure and land parcels are surveyed using GPS / Satellite Positioning or conventional surveying methods, which are mapped directly into the GIS.

We are currently working on several GIS projects as well as maintaining the existing database and base map. The following are a few examples:

City Limits: Each boundary line of the 116-mile city limits has been researched and mapped into a base map. From this map, a legal description is written with bearings and distances and is on file at the Ouachita Parish Clerk of Court. This document at present is 17 pages on "legal" length paper with 1,292 lines of single spaced text. This map and document is also updated after every new city annexation.

These are just a few of the projects the GIS and Land Surveying division are actively working on. We are in the process of networking all of the GIS base maps and database information city wide to all departments where they can build their own unique information onto the base maps, hopefully streamlining information exchange between both the public and individual departments. We also have plans to create a web-based GIS giving the general public access to many of the GIS functions.