2005-02-15 Community Planning and Development Commission Minutes

Home Browse Search

Administrative Review GIS Standards for Site Plan Review and Subdivision Regulations Kim Honetschlager, Reading's GIS Technician, spoke to the board regarding the benefits of establishing standards for the submission of digital documents for Site and Subdivision plans. First, she noted two major benefits of digital submissions: • The time and cost of updating GIS layers (e.g. parcels) will be reduced. • The integrity of the data will be far easier to maintain (files can be directly loaded into the GIS). She then said that the State GIS office is currently drafting a set of standards for digital submissions. She explained that a town's level of compliance with these standards will depend upon how many of these standards the town adopts as well as how accurately submitted plans will reference real-world features in the town's GIS. The standards in brief are: • A plan shall be submitted as one drawing file rather than as multiple drawings • The file format will be DFX (AutoCAD file format). • Standard CADD (Computer Automated Design & Drafting) naming conventions will be required. After explaining the standards, she said that her major concern was both how best to add the standards to the current regulations and how best to administer the standards to make sure that a digital document is submitted with the appropriate applications. CR said that currently the Site Plan Review regulations require, digital plans but the regulations are not always consistently enforced. He suggested asking the Town Engineer to amend the Subdivision regulations to require digital plans too. RH noted that such a change to the Subdivision regs would require a public hearing. He suggested keeping the Digital Submission Standards language general in the regs and specific in the applications on a case by case basis. This would allow the board both to customize the level of standards compliance and to avoid having to hold a public hearing each time the standards change. This suggestion met with general approval. JB asked if the board must accept the State's Digital Submission Standards in toto to have the legal authority to deny plans. If so, he wants to be sure that the board does accept the standards in toto. RH didn't think total acceptance would be necessary if the specifics were kept in the applications and offered two examples: 1. For Site Plan Reviews we could require digital plans prior to permitting occupancy. 2. For Subdivisions we could include the requirement for digital plans as an item in the calculation of the bond amount and not release the bond until we had the digital plans in hand. Page 2 of 12