Memorandum

City of Lawrence

City Manager’s Office

To:	David L. Corliss, City Manager
From:	Micah Seybold, GIS Coordinator
cc:	James Wisdom, Information Systems Director Bobbie Walthall, Executive Administrator
Date:	April 28^th, 2011
Re:	Address List Procedures

Certified vs. non-certified ownership lists

The City of Lawrence utilizes certified and non-certified address ownership lists for various notifications.  Certified property ownership lists are requested directly from the Douglas County Clerk’s Office.  The list is stamped as certified and delivered in paper and/or digital formats to the City.  Certified property ownership lists are required for some planning and benefit district processes.  Non-certified address lists are generated by City staff and used for all other address notification lists, such as street closures, project information or current project proposals.

Data source

The data source for certified and non-certified ownership lists is the parcels GIS dataset.  The parcels contain location, ownership and tax appraisal information from the Douglas County Appraisers Tax database.  The Douglas County GIS Division updates the parcels data weekly on Mondays.  The City GIS server then imports the updated parcels every Tuesday morning at 3:00 a.m. through an automated process.  The city uses this copy of the data for generating address lists.

Owner address list process

To generate an address list City GIS staff interactively selects properties to be notified within GIS software.  The selected properties are then exported into a spreadsheet or database.  The resulting table is then processed to remove excess fields and duplicate records.  The final product is a digital property owner address list usable for mass mailings.

Occupant address list

Most non-certified address lists are requested to include the residents or occupants living on the properties within the notification area.  The best data source option available to city staff for occupant lists is the city water billing database.  However, the data only contains occupant information if the water bill is paid by the renter rather than the landlord.  Those occupants whose water bills are covered in their rent payment are not in the water billing database and will not receive a notification.  The other option is to generate occupant address lists from the Address Points GIS layer.  This data is sourced from the water billing database & fire/medical maps to include multiplex, apartment and suite addresses.  The drawback of the address point dataset is that it stores the physical address only which do not always coincide with the occupant mailing (example PO Box address).  No matter the data source, occupant mailings are addressed to “Occupant” or “Current Resident” and eventually combined with the owner address list for the final address list used for the mailing.