How one city is saving time and improving parcel mapping data quality
The City of Thunder Bay manages its own parcel mapping data. In 2023, the City upgraded from the ArcMap parcel fabric to the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric in ArcGIS Pro. It was a major change, but it’s proven its worth by saving the City many hours of work fixing low-accuracy areas. Here’s how they did it.
The City of Thunder Bay, situated on Lake Superior, is the most populated city in northwestern Ontario with a metropolitan area of over 2,556 km2. That’s a lot of land to manage for a single municipality—especially given that they manage it themselves.
The City of Thunder Bay’s GIS team, led by Susan Henton, has been managing its own parcel mapping since the 1990s. In 2016, the City migrated to the ArcMap parcel fabric and enhanced its workflows to include capturing control points and survey parcel mapping. This led to increased accuracy in their parcel map, benefiting departments across the City who need to know how property within City limits is divided.
Having been a part of Esri Canada’s Land Information Solutions team since 2015, I was familiar with the City’s parcel fabric implementation and their unique needs, and was happy to assist when they came to Esri Canada for help when ArcMap’s deprecation was on the horizon.
The challenges of shifting to a record-based system
First, it’s important to understand why good parcel mapping data is essential. Keeping high-quality, accurate and current parcel mapping data is key because parcel maps need to match reality as closely as possible, preferably with good data that has no quality issues related to gaps and connectivity. Problems originating in the parcel mapping data can negatively impact other municipal functions that use parcels, including permitting, engineering, realty, planning and emergency management, not to mention those downloading parcel mapping data from the City’s open data hub.
The City had been working with the ArcMap parcel fabric. A parcel fabric is a continuous representation of connected parcels. Having an up-to-date, seamless parcel fabric allows users to access the best workflows and data management tools. It also allows them to increase both spatial and relative accuracy of the parcel mapping data by preserving recorded bearings and distances and capturing survey control.
However, when using the ArcMap parcel fabric, the City’s GIS team frequently had to correct misalignments between parcels (namely, areas of low accuracy and poor alignment) using a complicated process and specialized tools. “It’s like fixing issues in a 3D puzzle,” says Cassandra Knight, mapping technician with the City of Thunder Bay, in the sense that a member of the team might have to take the whole thing apart to find a mistake. The process of correcting these misalignments was arduous and time-consuming. But despite the difficulties, the team knew the process for fixing low-accuracy areas and had been working with the ArcMap parcel fabric for years.
Before the City of Thunder Bay moved to the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric in ArcGIS Pro, they were using the ArcMap parcel fabric (shown above). When using the ArcMap parcel fabric, the City found that correcting areas of low accuracy and poor alignment was an arduous and time-consuming process.
In 2022, Esri’s ArcMap moved out of general availability and into extended support. To stay aligned with the latest and most powerful Esri GIS technology, the City knew it needed to modernize. The ArcGIS Parcel Fabric, a core functionality in ArcGIS Pro, promised to improve workflows and tools.
“We had to move over,” says Knight. “We needed to ensure that we could continue using the best tools possible to maintain our parcel mapping data, so that we could continue supporting all the different departments at the City that use it.”
But I know that moving to the new Parcel Fabric is never a straightforward process. The ArcGIS Parcel Fabric introduces a completely new data model that uses a services-based architecture. It’s also a record-based system, and all parcel maintenance workflows are driven off a parcel record (such as a survey plan or a split description). While all of these aspects benefit organizations that perform land records maintenance, they required the City to adopt a completely different way of thinking.
Land Information Solutions services help reduce risk and ease transition
To make this rather complex migration happen, the City worked with my team at Esri Canada, the Land Information Solutions team. We specialize in parcel mapping modernization projects of varying sizes across the country.
Knowing where the City’s GIS team was coming from and where they wanted to go, we created a roadmap for the migration and showed the City’s GIS team how to transfer their data to the new system.
In a collaborative session, we helped the City decide what components of the ArcMap data model they wanted to migrate to ArcGIS Pro and how to map them into the new data model. Then, we developed a data migration workflow to help the City as they moved their data from the old system to the new. We developed a task list that broke this process down, step by step, making it easy to follow.
As part of the workflow design process, my team also developed an ArcGIS Pro package and all the attribute rules that the City would need for data maintenance.
The ArcGIS Parcel Fabric allows users to explore their parcels with an interactive interface that improves on the ArcMap parcel fabric using modern, streamlined tools.
It’s important to note that the Land Information Solutions team didn’t perform this data migration for the City. Instead, we taught the City the skills they’d need to do it themselves. This allowed the City’s GIS staff to get to know the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric while completing the migration.
While this is a more time-consuming teaching process, the experience was more valuable to the City because they gained skills that they can use to troubleshoot issues quickly.
The migration also empowered the City’s GIS team to validate the data once it had been transferred over to the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric. “We had to go back and forth between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro, making sure that everything was where it was supposed to be and that the naming was right. We found a lot of things we needed to clean up in the process of doing that, which was actually really beneficial,” says Knight.
Beyond the data migration itself, Esri Canada also hosted workflow workshops. In these sessions, City staff showed our team their existing workflows, and we in turn showed them what the new workflows would look like in ArcGIS Pro. This helped the City’s team learn the new processes, and at the same time develop improved ways to fit those processes around their business workflows.
Custom training using Thunder Bay data: showing users how it’s done… with their own data
One of the major highlights of the migration process was the custom training we developed to support the City.
Because ArcGIS Pro is a record-based solution, it requires a new way of thinking about processes and data. To make the training process more powerful, we developed training manuals and held custom training for the City’s team after they had been trained on the basics of ArcGIS Pro. Our custom training and manuals used the City’s own data, survey plans and workflows. This training was easier to pick up and the documents better to learn from than a generic training might have been. Basically, we’re teaching mappers how to do it with their data.
As part of the custom training packages we develop for our customers, Esri Canada can develop comprehensive training documents based on customer data and local survey plans. Here, the City of Thunder Bay’s parcel mapping data has been used to customize this training document about the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric—meaning that City staff can immediately put lessons into a context they’re already familiar with.
These custom training documents were so useful to the City that the GIS team still refers to the documents daily. The training has also been extremely useful for onboarding new team members, as all the necessary procedures are captured in the training documents using City of Thunder Bay context.
“The training in general was crucial,” says Knight. “This new system requires a completely different way of doing things. Using the ArcGIS Parcel Fabric is easier, but you have to get into a new mindset, and having customized training really helped with that.”
Following the training, the City performed user acceptance testing, during which they tried out the software and new workflows independently. Not long after, the City was able to go live with the new parcel fabric. Our team remained engaged with the project through weekly working sessions, during which we worked through any questions that the City’s GIS team had run into that week. These weekly check-ins helped the City address issues that hadn’t come up in their training.
Once the migration project was closed, we officially handed over the City’s GIS team to Esri Canada’s Technical Support team in a hand-off meeting. In this meeting, support staff introduced themselves and discussed how the City could log support cases, while still keeping us in the loop.
The results: a faster, more intuitive parcel mapping system that saves hours of maintenance and improves data quality
The ArcGIS Parcel Fabric has made the City’s parcel mapping process faster and more intuitive. As an example, Brent Bigford, GIS application specialist with the City of Thunder Bay, found an area in the source data where all the associated parcels—30 to 40 of them—were misaligned. That meant that anyone generating maps based on this section of the parcel fabric would end up with an inaccurate representation of the property lines.
In ArcMap, it might have taken hours and a knowledge of specialized tools to fix all the related issues this misalignment might have caused. But in ArcGIS Pro, Brent used built-in tools to easily and quickly fix the alignment, all while preserving the recorded bearings and distances of the survey plan.
ArcGIS Pro provides a clean, modern interface for interacting with parcel mapping data, and the City of Thunder Bay has benefitted in terms of both time and data quality.
By using ArcGIS Pro for their parcel fabric maintenance, the City of Thunder Bay’s GIS team are also gaining widely applicable Pro skills that they can use for other parts of their jobs as well.
By improving their efficiency with parcel fabric maintenance, the team now has more time to help all the other departments they work with. And by improving the quality of the parcel mapping data, the productivity of all downstream users (both inside and outside the City) is also being increased.
Overall, although the migration started as a daunting process, and although it was a significant amount of work, the quality of life improvements have been worth the effort.
“I was very hesitant [to migrate to ArcGIS Pro] at first. It was really scary going over to something new, and it was a lot of work to go through and QC everything. But once you’re on the other side, it just makes your life a little bit better.” —Cassandra Knight, mapping technician, City of Thunder Bay
Want to learn more about Esri Canada’s land information support and modernization services? We’re here to help. If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of moving from ArcMap to Pro, check out our journey map to get a simple breakdown of the process. We also run frequent instructor-led courses on ArcMap to Pro migration, so that you can get expert answers to all of your questions in a workshop setting. Or, contact us directly at parcels@esri.ca.