Drainage Utility Fees by FME

The Watershed Protection Department at the City of Austin utilizes a plethora of data to protect lives, property and the environment of our community by reducing the impact of flood, erosion and water pollution. Over 95% of the funding for the department comes from a drainage utility fee paid by residential and commercial customers for their property’s impact on the stormwater drainage system. Our team administers the fee and calculates unique bills for every property in the City’s full purpose jurisdiction based on the property’s amount and percent of impervious cover. We utilize FME to complete complex data update projects, improve data quality, and streamline recurring processes.
We would like to do a two-part presentation. The first portion would focus on the general use of FME as a valuable tool for the Drainage Utility Fee Team and the second would take a closer look at one of our workspaces used to determine if a property should be updated with impervious cover data from a recently finalized building permit. The workspace finds properties that can be automatically updated (changes within a certain threshold) and populates them in a versioned edit session in our ArcSDE database. We will explain the goals of the workspace, the transformers and data that make it work, and the value it adds to the Drainage Utility Fee process.