Maintaining accurate geographic location information for facility/sites is critical to several agency initiatives such as watershed management, environmental justice, and community right-to-know. To support this need, a geographic maintenance program was built into the Facility/Site Identification System. This program, known as Skipper, runs nightly and performs several functions. These include: 1) coordinate conversion from Township, Range, Section, or Universal Transverse Mercator, or Washington Stateplane coordinates, to Latitude-Longitude; 2) update of Facility/Site GIS coverage and Facility/Site shapefile, 3) generate an E-mail a report (including QA information about whether the facility is located within the state boundary and whether it is located within a large waterbody) to each system user who has entered or updated geographic locations, 4) update values of County, Congressional District, Legislative District, Water Resource Inventory Area, and Ecology region, for each newly entered or updated facility/site.
The Facility/Site Application contains a function that allows authorized users to view Facility locations with ArcView desktop Geographic Information System (GIS). A user can select a facility/site using any of the Facility/Site application query tools. Then, the user presses a button to view the selected facility location with other GIS data layers displayed as background information. Similarly when viewing facilities within ArcView, the user can select a facility using ArcView’s spatial selection tools. Then the user presses a button to view facility information within the Facility/Site application. This bi-directional flow between spatial and tabular applications allows users to satisfy complex ad-hoc queries.