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Using your city's GIS layers and parcel numbers in 311

Your city already maintains GIS layers for council districts, trash days and parcels. Sentra 311 reads them, so every request knows where it is in your world.

By the Sentra 311 team · · 4 min read

Most cities already have good GIS data. Council districts, parcels, trash pickup days, street sweeping routes, park boundaries. It usually lives in ArcGIS, maintained by a GIS analyst who knows it well.

A 311 system should use that data, not ask you to redraw it. Sentra 311 reads your layers directly.

Connecting a layer

In the portal, Admin › GIS layers has a browser for ArcGIS services. Point it at your city's ArcGIS server or Hub, pick a layer and choose how to use it:

  • Show it on maps, so staff can see district lines or parcels under the requests.
  • Look it up for each request, so every request records which district, route or zone it falls in.

You choose which field to show, such as "District 5" or "Tuesday." The full set of fields for that spot is available on the request page in an "All fields" dialog.

Council districts

Council districts get special treatment because so much depends on them. You can import districts from a layer into Sentra 311, and then:

  • Route requests by district, so the right crew gets them first.
  • Filter the queue by district.
  • Run council district reports and email them on a schedule.

If a request's pin falls outside every district, staff can set the district by hand on the request page.

Addresses and parcel numbers

When a city has an address points layer, Sentra 311 uses it first for address search and for turning a map pin into an address. Official addresses come up before anything else. For landmarks, intersections and anything not in the city's layer, it falls back to OpenStreetMap's geocoding.

If your address layer includes parcel numbers (APNs), each request records the parcel number too. Staff can search requests by APN, which is useful for code enforcement follow-ups and for finding every request at one property.

City limits

Your city boundary is used to block reports from outside city limits. Residents are told before they send. That keeps county roads and neighboring cities out of your queue and saves a referral.

Maps

Base maps come from Mapbox or OpenStreetMap, set on the server. Staff maps follow dark mode in the portal. Requests show as pins colored by status, with clusters where there are many.

What this looks like in practice

The Sentra 311 demo city uses real public layers from the City of Fresno's GIS Hub: city limits, council districts, parks, trash pickup days and street sweeping routes. A pothole reported on a given street automatically records its council district, its trash day and its sweeping route. A supervisor can then ask "how many requests came from Tuesday trash routes last month?" without anyone tagging anything by hand.

Questions supervisors can answer

Once layers are connected, a lot of questions become one filter or one report:

  • How many requests came from each council district last quarter?
  • Which trash routes have the most missed pickups?
  • Are graffiti reports concentrated near particular parks?
  • Which street sweeping routes get the most debris reports?

Reports can be grouped by any lookup layer, the same way they're grouped by department or request type. See council district reports.

Using layers for routing

Routing rules can use council districts, so a request in District 3 goes to the crew that covers District 3. Rules can be set per request type, so potholes follow districts while water leaks go to Utilities citywide. When district routing is off, routing follows request type alone.

Layers on the map

Staff can turn layers on and off on the portal map and the request page. Seeing the sweeping route or the park boundary under a cluster of requests often explains the cluster.

Tips for GIS analysts

  1. Use public, read-only services for layers 311 only needs to read.
  2. Keep field names stable. If a field is renamed, update the layer's display field in Sentra 311.
  3. Simplify boundaries if they're very detailed. It speeds up lookups without changing results.
  4. Tell us about layers that change often, like seasonal routes. Lookups are stored on each request at the time it's filed, which keeps history accurate when a route changes later.

Writing back to your GIS, for example creating features in ArcGIS from 311 requests, is on our roadmap.

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