Geospatial Data Engineering to notify affected property owners of proposed changes to the Christchurch district plan.

Role: Research Analyst
Monitoring & Research Unit
Christchurch City Council

Achievements:

  • “Address Matters” Presentation at Intergraph Users Conference (Christchurch, 2016).

The Resource Management Act (RMA) requires Council to notify all parties whose properties are affected by changes to the planning rules. This includes both property owners and occupiers (tenants). Failure to notify any affected party can result in litigation in the Environment Court.

There is an associated issue identified by LINZ in that in the absence of a national street address dataset, around 15-30 percent of properties nationwide are unable to be identified by a single address. The Council street address dataset has been verified to 85 percent accuracy for NZ Post bulk mail discounts.

I was assigned the challenge of achieving the 100 percent accuracy required by the RMA.

  • I developed processes for business support teams to generate mail merge letters from spatial analysis performed by GIS teams, on terms dictated by the customer, based on stored procedures in SQL Server Spatial running algorithms to match Council street addresses with NZ Post’s postal delivery addresses.
  • The turnaround period decreased from 3 months to 10 days (including QA) and has an error rate of less than 1 percent, judged by postal returns.
  • The process was also used by the GIS & Analytics team to notify properties affected by infrastructure works

Responsibilities:

  • Identify properties affected by changes to land use zoning.
  • Link CCC property information to NZ Post postal delivery addresses (GeoPAF).
  • Provide spreadsheet outputs for mail merge letter content and attachments.

Technology:

  • Geomedia, Google Earth
  • Microsoft SQL Server database engine (MS SQL).

Outcomes:

  • 500,000 affected property owners identified and contacted.

2015

Updated: