A Whole New World

Environmental Systems Research Institute, more commonly known as ESRI, gave a presentation to a crowd at the Redlands Senior Center providing information about their geographic information systems. Philip Mielke of ESRI led the meeting, informing the group of local projects that have benefited the city of Redlands. Covering topics from crime mapping and prevention to allocating resources for maintenance. A company that went from a team of ten, to 2,600 people in the Redlands office alone, continues to strive and provide the region with much needed data. Known for years for their desktop software that required an engineer, and took special training to use found them pivoting in a different direction. Philip Mielke recanted the evolution of ESRI, “About five years ago, we recognized that, keeping GIS in the hands of a select few was really hurting us. What we really wanted to be able to do is empower an entire organization to work with mapping in a variety of different ways, which changed how we’re developing software. So now there's a lot of development towards our newest tool ArcGIS online.” The now billion-dollar-a-year company once faced off against the 98-billion-dollar-a-year tech giant Google. In true David and Goliath fashion, ESRI stood its ground finding its software much further along than Google could imagine. Google decided it wasn’t worth time and money to displace ESRI. ESRI is the second largest privately held software company that is “driven by vision instead of the bottom line,” said Mielke. Working with federal, state, and local governments, ESRI provides much needed mapping data to help companies and local government make better-informed decisions, and even provided the city of Redlands with data for their repaving initiative called the Pavement Accelerated Repair Implementation Strategy (PARIS). Glen Harrison, a Redlands resident of three years posed the question, “You mentioned the repaving of the streets. Is there a goal to repave every street? A lot of them need it.” Which Mielke replied, “The biggest issue with that, and that was a project that I worked directly on, to give you an idea of how much it would cost, we ran a little bit of an analysis on it: $78 million. $78 million is about twice our operating budget. Before that we had devoted about anywhere between quarter-of-a-million to half-a-million to be able to fix those streets. So you can understand how under-treated they really were in that case.” With the information the ESRI geographic information system provided, the City of Redlands then took items from the map, considered major locations, and allocated resources accordingly. The information helped to identify how to prioritize those funds. The priority was to keep downtown looking nice, so they could keep the streets looking presentable for residents, as well as visitors. Another item on the list was sidewalks and streets in residential areas where schools are located so kids can have a safe walk to school. Another high priority item was to insure healthcare workers as well as patients stayed safe around healthcare facilities. Redlands will continue to use this data over the next ten years to efficiently and effectively allocate resources. ESRI provides information to healthcare facilities as well, from the best way to optimize hospital planning to deploying emergency services in the most efficient way possible. ESRI is also working hand in hand with Loma Linda University making them the two largest employers in the region. Right now Loma Linda University is mapping where people are getting a higher than average rate of cancer in Southern California. They maintain a tumor registry database with the location of where people are getting cancer. The city of Redlands has 526 latent miles of streets in different states of decay. Each street has its own individual needs for repair. The city also keeps track of 40,000 trees they need to maintain. If you would like to help report information, and aid the city in their efforts you can log onto www.cityofredlands.org/311 or download the app to your smartphone.