A bird's eye view: GIS technology is giving policymakers a new perspective.

• Author: Sealover, Ed
• Position: Geographic information system

The New Jersey Legislature, like every other state government, has faced considerable budget shortfalls over the past several years. As part of the process for dealing with the decline in revenue, officials decided to reduce state aid to municipalities.

Under the plan put forth several years back, cities, towns, boroughs and villages of 10,000 people or less would have faced particularly stringent funding reductions, and municipalities of 5,000 or less would have lost all state aid. All this was laid out in lists and charts on paper. One legislator, however, wanted to look at the plan from another angle and asked the Office of Legislative Services to put it in a map.

Using geographic information system (GIS) technology, the office laid out locations of small municipalities taking the biggest hits and showed that in some counties, almost all local governments were affected, said Raysa Martinez Kruger, senior research analyst. Though Kruger doesn't know exactly how the mapped information was used, she does recall that former Governor Jon Corzine's funding plan ended up changing slightly.

New Jersey is not the first state government to use GIS, but its experience is a good example of how the computerized mapmaking technology is becoming more commonplace in research and policymaking decisions. Although GIS may not uncover new information, Kruger and other proponents say it lays out statistics in a way that helps users interpret them in a new light.

"What GIS provides is the visual presentation of the data," Kruger says. "And I suppose that's achievable through a spreadsheet, maybe pie charts or graphs. But the map communicates different information that can not be communicated in any other method, typically geographical."

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Yes, the same technology that powers Internet driving-direction sites is now making its way into statehouses across the country. And its variety of applications is as diverse as the states that are employing it.

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Explained simply, GIS technology takes masses of information on any subject--from population projections to foreclosure listings to bark-beetle-killed trees--and overlaps those statistics with a map of the city, county or state for which the numbers are pertinent.

The earliest legislative uses of the tool were simple informational maps. Pennsylvania worked with research universities that had access to GIS systems in the mid-1990s to lay out maps of legislative districts...