Esri Canada congratulates the Halifax Regional Municipality for being recognized with the Esri Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award. The municipality was selected from thousands of Esri customer organizations worldwide for their exceptional use of geographic information system (GIS) technology to advance their operations and improve services across the municipality.

"The Halifax Regional Municipality's commitment to improving municipal services and enhancing the quality of life for their residents using GIS is truly remarkable," said Alex Miller, president, Esri Canada. "Their leadership in advancing GIS serves as a model for other municipalities across Canada. In fact, the municipality ranks first in the Geospatial Maturity Index Report, ahead of 96 other public sector organizations in North America."

"Our use of GIS at the municipality has evolved from traditional land management to enhancing services such as planning, housing and development, wildfire and disaster response, climate change and traffic management," noted Paul Shaffelburg, director, data analytics and visualization for the municipality. "GIS is part of the solution to every challenge we're facing. We're pleased that our concerted effort in applying technology strategically is delivering better outcomes for our community."

The Halifax Regional Municipality, the largest municipality in Atlantic Canada, has used GIS technology for over 35 years. In 2017, the municipality completed a geospatial strategy that identified the opportunity to further leverage location intelligence to inform decisions, manage assets, engage constituents and drive innovation across various business units.

The municipality updated their geospatial strategy in 2022 and has significantly improved governance and transformed processes across their organization in areas including asset and infrastructure management, planning, IT, public works, emergency services, finance, parks and recreation, environment, transit and municipal council.

Some of the recent notable advancements in GIS at the municipality include:

• Implementation of location referencing for roads and highways
• Improved capital planning
• Enhanced data collaboration with external stakeholders on projects
• Formalization and automation of civic addressing workflows using ArcGIS Pro tasks
• Measurement of response times for Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency (HRFE) using ArcGIS GeoEvent Server
• Migration of the Situational Awareness tool to ArcGIS Experience Builder for fire and emergency services
• Utilization of ArcGIS Survey123 for fire building inspections
• Enhanced public access to the municipality's open data, mapping applications and analytic dashboards through ArcGIS Hub

Visit the Halifax Data, Mapping & Analytics Hub

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