Foundations for Success: GIS Brownfield Inventories In Niagara County

Useful data is the key ingredient in a successful brownfield project and many steps in the reuse cycle will be out of reach until such details are developed. From basic facts about a property’s size and terrain, to more advanced intel on contaminants and incentive opportunities, a brownfield property requires a lot of study, a lot of knowledge, and a good way to share it with others.

This is true for any single brownfield site. But what if your community has multiple sites? Niagara County, NY has nearly 600 brownfield sites and even more data on them all.

In the summer of 2023, Niagara County’s Center for Economic Development requested assistance to streamline all its existing inventories into a singular source that could capture important details from thousands of brownfields across six municipalities. With help from CCLR, the country transformed scattered, static data into a centralized Geographic Information System (GIS) system that evolves with every new bit of information.

Inventory In Practice

In the past, brownfield inventories were kept in large paper binders or stored on hard drives. Often the information was only accurate for the time it was created. As time passes, new information is collected, new records compiled, and fragments of old and new inventories for different areas can quickly pile up into a jumbled mess.

Many of Niagara County’s inventories were developed in PDF documents written over the last two decades. Some by local municipalities, others by the County’s brownfield program. Each inventory had different data, data sources, and varying scopes.

The team at Niagara County spent years consolidating their records into databases and digital maps built in a GIS. Initially, they made great strides but the work was much more than they could manage on their own.

Using this foundation, CCLR was able to build a new, improved GIS database that gathered all the existing data from all the County’s sources, including the PDF documents and scanned paper files. The new inventory is a singular source of information that allows the County’s experts to call up all the important details about a site within seconds.

When combined with the rest of their robust GIS layers and files, the team has a powerful tool for capturing the big and small picture in every project. Better yet, the new inventory is a model that can be duplicated to any organization facing the same challenges. Here’s how it works.

Data in the Goldilocks Zone

Deciding what data you wish to include is the most important part of a brownfield inventory. It is also the most difficult task. Niagara County and CCLR worked on multiple iterations of what ultimately became the best framework for Niagara’s needs. Doing so requires a good grasp of what will be the “Goldilocks” zone of just enough information–not too much, not too little. The framework is highlighted below and can be a very useful tool that helps clarify what an inventory should provide. Everything else flows from this foundation and getting it right will literally save you at least ten hours (and as many headaches).

Please note that this framework is for a total inventory of 556 properties at many different stages of the reuse cycle. Many properties have only been identified and lack assessment, remediation, or reuse data. Other properties have been fully cleaned up and redeveloped. Very few properties have all the information to fill out this framework. But knowing what is missing allows Niagara County to know what information to seek in the future.

And regardless of a single property’s condition, this is the information that most potential buyers, developers, or community members would want to understand. The framework prepares all parties to have a transparent, consistent data source that leads to a shared understanding of what is, and isn’t, known.

Making the Change

Thanks to the framework, and Niagara County’s robust existing GIS data, the consolidation stage was straightforward. It can be tedious and time consuming, but the end result is that every single property, from every single record, gets logged into the new database.

This information is assembled on what is known as a “parcel” layer. The parcel layer is essentially a digital map of all subdivided properties in a jurisdiction. Almost all communities can find their parcel data on an active GIS mapping software provided by their County’s assessor office. Using a copy of this map, CCLR created a new inventory for Niagara’s GIS server that puts all the relevant information for each brownfield site into the “parcel” or property record that contains the shape, size, and location. By mapping each brownfield in this fashion, anyone can get a clear view of the terrain and accurately visualize the footprint of any brownfield in their area.

A Foundation for Future Work

Once complete, the CCLR team sent the information back to Niagara County in the form of a new GIS map layer. The database the map is built upon is structured like a spreadsheet. With some modest training, the GIS software allows County staff to maintain the information with a few quick steps. Better still, the spreadsheet functionality allows the staff to generate many different reports that can sort and identify their properties on any of the variables provided by the framework.

This type of inventory empowers an adept program administrator, like Niagara County’s Center for Economic Development’s Brownfields Manager, Amy Schifferli, AICP, to see their brownfields more like a “portfolio” of assets to manage, leverage, and promote. The inventory gives Schifferli a broader view of the County’s needs and allows her to be strategic on when and where to focus her efforts for the next big success.

Conclusion

Brownfield inventories are valuable tools. But all tools need to be maintained. The best way to maintain a great inventory is to develop a database and map layer in a GIS software that fits your community’s IT system. For the thousands of communities that utilize GIS tools, CCLR can help you create such a database and populate it with all the paper and PDF files that you may have in storage.

As I often tell folks, this might not be the flashiest work that a community will do, but a great GIS inventory is a key piece of infrastructure that makes everything else run smoothly. Plus, we know that information is power and tools like this put that information at your fingertips. It’s such a great way to level up your program.

For more information on brownfield inventories, and to get a first-hand demonstration of the process described in this blog, check out our webinar “Making Your Market: How Creating a Brownfield Inventory can Bring Redevelopment Opportunities to Life,” and CCLR’s Guide to Revitalizing Underutilized Properties.