What is the purpose of the Land Information Office?
Many of Brown County's most basic services rely on accurate and up-to-date land information. Emergency response, resource conservation, infrastructure planning, facility maintenance, economic development, regulatory inspection and many other county functions involve the storage of, access to, and analysis of various land records. Efficient access to information about addresses, buildings, roads, utilities, elevation, floodplains, response districts, voting wards, zoning, land use, parcels, and other combinations of land information is critical for various functions of government. This information is very beneficial to private companies as well.
A Geographic Information System (GIS) has the unique ability to combine land information into a comprehensive system that can be shared throughout each County department. Businesses and private citizens who use land records and maps also benefit from these services. GIS has emerged as the best framework for storing, identifying, searching, and analyzing massive volumes of data, maps, documents, and other data. GIS has proven to be a very powerful way to combine text search and geographic search to allow analysts and decision makers to quickly find relevant information.
Mission
The mission of the Land Information Office (LIO) is to implement the Brown County Land Information Plan. This plan is updated every 3 years. It addresses the technological and organizational issues associated with storing, sharing, and depicting information and records related to land. The integration of mapping, geographic information systems (GIS), document imaging, databases, and computer networking are among the topics addressed in the plan. The overall goal of this plan is to ensure key program functions of the County are supported. The plan also provides county and municipal officials, private businesses, and other interested parties with basic knowledge of the County's effort in land information and GIS.
Partnerships
The success of the efforts of the LIO hinges on the cooperation of a number of departments within Brown County as well as other local governments, state agencies, businesses, utilities, public stakeholders and the Wisconsin Land Information Program (WLIP). Through formal and informal institutional arrangements and policies, we have developed a community-wide understanding of custodial responsibilities, implementation priorities, and standards to realize our vision of a countywide multi- participant geographic / land information system.
History
The Land Information Program was created in 1989 to transform land information from a 150-year-old, non-integrated, paper-based institution into a digital world reflective of and in step with the Information Age. Under state statute, every County in Wisconsin has established a Land Information Office to carry out these goals.
Funding
The Wisconsin Land Information Program is funded through document recording fees collected in the Register of Deeds office. This fee has been supported by many private sector groups such as the Realtors Association and to enable County LIOs to provide more land information on the Internet. Brown County has utilized these revenues to create the online Property Search and internet mapping web sites which are the County's most heavily-used internet sites with over 1200 visitors per day.
