As many of you are now aware, the MEGIS
budget appears to have been zeroed out during the recent
budget negotiations. It appears that MEGIS was to be funded
through a proposal to create a Department of Technical
Services (DTS) with a corresponding general fund request to
fund said DTS department. However, when the Department of
Technical Services creation failed to happen, OIT was asked to
reconstitute a budget under its current role within the
Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS). In
doing this it would appear that the budget for MEGIS was
zeroed out at this point. I’m not sure why and don’t have an
answer for this yet. I hope by engaging with the legislative
joint standing committees we report to we may get more
information and can begin to discuss how this can be reversed.
MEGIS and the Maine Library of Geographic
Information (GeoLibrary) were both create by statute. MEGIS’
primary role is to enable state agencies with GIS and in the
course of doing so to provide:
·
Maintenance of a public
geospatial data portal
·
Coordination of state
efforts with federal and local efforts
·
Development and
maintenance of geospatial architecture to state agencies and
public-facing web services
·
Maintenance of base
data
·
Development of
web-mapping applications for state agencies
The GeoLibrary works with MEGIS to
accomplish this and what the GeoLibrary was established to do
in partnership with public and private stakeholders. The
GeoLibrary activities extend beyond State government to
working with other public and private groups and local Maine
government to extend and promote geospatial efforts statewide
to the public. The GeoLibrary cannot do its work without
MEGIS.
What does this mean? Simply that many of
the GIS services, data acquisition projects, and data catalog
resources we have all come to use and rely upon may not be
there in the very near future. I urge you to contact your
friends and peers to let them know about this unexpected and
dire situation. I also ask those of you who feel comfortable
and can reach out to your elected officials, to let them know
what is happening and what it means to you. Inform them by
email, letter, phone call, or even a quick conversation around
town when you see them, that MEGIS needs to be funded if we
are going to continue to make gains in Maine using geospatial
data to everyone’s benefit.
Jon Giles, PLS, GISP
Chair, Maine Library of Geographic
Information
GIS Coordinator, Sebago Technics, Inc.
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