Illinois GIS Strategy

As mandated by the State of Texas to be the GIS coordinator for our 16-county region, our goal is to promote the interaction and cooperation of all GIS professionals within the region.

NCTCOG's GIS Data Clearinghouse contains free, downloadable GIS files such as roads, hydrology, railroads, jurisdictional and political boundaries, city and county limits, and more.

Some of the ways we are accomplishing this goal is through bi-annual meetings of GIS professionals. These meetings are organized and sponsored by NCTCOG and allow other organizations, such as local governments, universities, private sector companies and software vendors a central meeting place to disseminate information. We also offer ESRI-certified training at the NCTCOG offices. As 911 Coordinators for the 13 of the 16 counties within our region, our job is to assist these counties and their municipalities in administering and developing their 911 GIS applications and to assist in creating highly accurate basemaps for those applications. Once every two years, NCTCOG facilitates the purchase of high-quality aerial images and digital elevation contours of North Central Texas. The digital imagery are available for purchase by our members at a much-reduced cost over each entity having to order the photography on their own, and the resulting images are made available for viewing and printing on www.dfwmaps.com. NCTCOG's GIS projects and our demographic research are also closely aligned. We are currently gathering data to create parcel-based land use, and GIS plays a major role in allocating data for our demographic forecasts. The culmination of our demographic research combined with GIS technology can be seen at www.dfwmaps.com.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) is a voluntary association of, by and for local governments, and was established to assist local governments in planning for common needs, cooperating for mutual benefit, and coordinating for sound regional development. NCTCOG's purpose is to strengthen both the individual and collective power of local governments and to help them recognize regional opportunities, eliminate unnecessary duplication, and make joint decisions. Each member government appoints a COG voting representative from its governing body. These voting representatives make up the General Assembly, which annually elects the Executive Board. The Executive Board, composed of 13 locally elected officials, is the policy-making body for all activities undertaken by the Council of Governments, including program activities and decisions, regional plans, and fiscal and budgetary policies.