Minnesota’s Lake Superior Coastal Program

Duluth Digital Plat & Parcel Development for

Lake Superior Watershed Protection

Richard Bunten /GIS Specialist/ City of Duluth

January 4, 2008

Project No. 306-12-08

Contract No. A92540

This project was funded in part by the Coastal Zone Management Act, by NOAA’s
Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management, in conjunction with Minnesota’s
Lake Superior Coastal Program.
 Acknowledgements

NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Minnesota Lake Superior Coastal Program
City of Duluth
St. Louis County
Pro-West and Associates, Inc.
LHB, Inc.

The City of Duluth GIS Office would like to thank the above organizations for their part
in funding this project, providing data pertaining to the project or contracting to provide
services for the project’s successful completion.
Introduction
This project represents the completion of the third year of a five-year project to
map the property ownership within the City of Duluth. The completion of another
11,400 parcels marks another major step toward a complete citywide property
ownership map. As of now, more than 24,000 parcels of the estimated 52,000
parcels within the City of Duluth have been mapped. These parcels also
represent another major portion of the city’s coordinated effort with Saint Louis
County to map the entire county by 2010.

With this accurate property ownership map, the City is actively trying to better
manage development, its infrastructure and protect the natural environment,
including the Lake Superior watershed. This year’s project mapped property in
the Tischer Creek and Amity Creek watersheds and most of the eastern part of
Duluth along the Lake Superior lakeshore. The residential neighborhoods
mapped in this project will provide the city a tool for working with property owners
to reduce sedimentation and contamination of storm water fed directly into
nearby trout streams and Lake Superior. Finally, the city public works
department will be better able to work with property owners to manage storm
water mitigation plans and ‘Inflow and Infiltration’ programs.

Work Completed
This project digitally mapped the property ownership of 11,465 parcels in the
Tischer and Amity Creek watersheds. Coordinates for 46 Public Land Survey
corners were researched and surveyed. This information was use to breakdown
each public land survey section into quarter-sections and sixteenth-sections.
The public land survey was then used as a base map to register property
subdivisions in the correct location. In addition to creating parcels, 15 Public
Land Survey sections were mapped within the city. Over 152 platted
subdivisions were mapped that include 1100+ subdivision blocks and 15500+
subdivision lots. Over 1100 encumbrances were mapped, which include
easements, condemnations and vacations.

Results
The parcel layer when overlaid with other GIS layers will help the City of Duluth
protect the Tischer Creek and Amity Creek watersheds. Analysis with the parcel
layer may help prevent undesired development, harmful land use and pollution
near wetlands. It can also help protect erodible soils, tributaries, and streams
within the watersheds. Used in conjunction with other layers, the parcel layer will
help the city better identify ownership pertaining to sources of storm water runoff
and storm water infiltrating the sanitary sewer. Identifying these sources will help
the city prevent sanitary overflows and design storm sewer projects that better
protect the watershed’s resources.
By knowing the exact location of property lines in relation to sensitive natural
features like wetlands, city planners and engineers will also be able to assist
developers with development designs that protect the Lake Superior watershed.
Engineering staff will be able to overlay storm water and surface water models on
the property map and be able to quickly determine ownership. Being able to
easily determine ownership of land will help the city work closely with property
owners to mitigate storm water runoff. Engineers can quickly show landowners
how storm water mitigation structures will look and reduce flow on their property.
Future planning to prevent flooding and protect water quality will be greatly
enhanced using the parcel map as a base layer to reflect the impacts of land
usages on the system.

Finally, the parcel map will be integrated into a larger countywide parcel
database and possibly a regional or national parcel database. This information
will allow users to create highly accurate land-use and zoning maps that can be
used for planning and analysis that encompass large tracts of the Lake Superior
watershed.

Conclusions

The plat and parcel map creation of the Amity and Tischer Creek watersheds
progressed well and few unexpected problems occurred. A few of the problems
that were encountered had to do with survey issues that allow for gaps and
overlaps in property ownership, another issue was how to deal with railroad
rights-of-way that have no documentation, and finally our biggest issue was how
to distribute error in a subdivision to make it fit within the parcel fabric.

First, the question arose about how to deal with land that exist, but is not
accounted for in the legal descriptions? These are areas where there are known
survey issues gaps in the public survey record. It was concluded that these
areas would be mapped, but ownership would have to be determined at a later
date.

Second, documentation of railroad rights-of-ways is very difficult to obtain. The

county may have never received documentation of railroad rights-of-ways, but
the railroad and rights-of-way does exist. The railroad companies are hard to
contact to get documentation and when you do get someone they have lost the
documentation because railroads have merged and split throughout the last 125-
year history of Duluth. As a result, rights-of-ways were mapped as best as
possible, assumptions were made and documented. Further research will need
to be conducted in the future.

Third, because this parcel-mapping project moved into older parts of the city
where a plat traverse was not possible, the issue of how to distribute error within
the plat arose. ‘Error’ means the difference between the measured distance on
the plat and the actual distance available on the GIS parcel fabric. Error could be
distributed to a side or corner of the plat, it could be placed within rights-of-ways
or it could be distributed evenly throughout the plat.

Our consultant Pro-West and Associates thought that the error should be place in
a corner or to one side of the plat while maintaining the true measured or precise
distances for lots throughout the plat. This makes for quicker data entry and
easier identification of where the error is placed. However, this type of data
entry means that lot lines progressively get less accurate while maintaining their
precise width as you move across the plat. The far side of a plat could have lot
lines that are inches to several feet distant from their actually real world location.

Therefore, it was decided, to distribute the error within each plat evenly across
the plat, while maintaining precise road rights-of-ways width. This process was
originally developed by the City GIS office and used in all areas mapped by the
City GIS staff in previous projects, but only now adopted by our consultant
halfway through this year’s project. Proportioning plats creates lots that are less
precise but maintains their real world location more accurately. Therefore the
parcels will overlap with aerial photography more accurately and follow existing
survey methods established by local surveyors.

It was stated in our conclusions from our 2005 parcel-mapping project that the
city GIS office needed to reduce its match hours for the next project, because it
had a hard time meeting the number of match hours required. This project
reduced those hours significantly and the GIS office was able to easily fulfill its
match. Our next projects will have a smaller match for the GIS office because of
matching funds provided by St. Louis County. This will free up time for the city
GIS office to do more maintenance of the parcel database, keep up with
scheduled quarterly updates and use the parcel map as an analysis tool for
various city projects that will help improve the water quality of Lake Superior.

However, the city will still be responsible for mapping 1,000 parcels in its 2008
project. In my opinion, it is vital for any government entity that takes on a parcel-
mapping project to have an employee do some of the parcel editing. It creates a
sense of ownership of the data, improves editing skills that will be needed for the
maintenance of the database, and provides the employee knowledge about
parcel mapping that will let them knowledgably converse with the consultant
about parcel mapping methodology and eventually result in a product that the
government entity will find useful upon completion.

Another reason for the success of this project was the survey control that was
attained for creating the section, quarter section and sixteenth section divisions
of the Public Land Survey (PLS). Having an accurate base for control allowed
editors to quickly and easily build subdivisions, and metes and bounds parcels.
Without this important information there would have been many gaps and
overlaps of property. Also, it was discovered that the city’s many “Street
Improvement Projects” (SIPs) could provide valuable control on the location of
platted street centerlines. This information provided a valuable source of data
that was essentially free and improved the accuracy of property. We will
continue to use these projects as a source of survey data and should save the
city money since survey crews will be needed less.

Finally, continued use of an experienced consultant helps us keep our project

moving forward with little down time. Having Saint Louis County and the City of
Duluth use the same consultant is a big advantage. All three of us are able to
easily communicate with each other and solve problems as needed. Our
development model of using disconnected editing in ArcGIS 9.2 worked very well
again. The City of Duluth housed the database on our SDE server and provided
checkout/checkin service to Pro-West and Associates. This editing model
allowed three people to work on the database at the same time. Once each
editor’s data was complete, it was checked back into the parent database and
each editor received new edits. Pro-West and Associates and the City of Duluth
GIS office were very pleased with the software’s functionality.

Appendices

Nothing to report