Barrowman Leads Shorewood onto GIS Platform

Nothing about Roger Barrowman’s background screams techno-wizard.

After graduating from Joliet West High School, he trained in firefighting.

He served as foreman of Parks & Rec and superintendent of Public Works for the Village of Shorewood before becoming acting administrator in February, a seat he also kept warm on two previous occasions in his 20 years with the Village.

And now, at age 49, he is leading Shorewood into the world of Geographic Information Systems. He is nothing if not a self-taught do-it-all.

Barrowman’s interest in GIS was piqued by his predecessor, former Shorewood village administrator Kurt Carroll. Carroll spoke often about how a GIS system could be used to streamline workloads, assist in budgeting and push the Village into a more efficient way of doing its business.

What is GIS? In layman’s terms, a geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data.

“He was the assistant village administrator where he came from (Munster, Ind.),” Barrowman said of Carroll’s background. “He also worked on the GIS over there. He kept telling me how good this stuff could be and how helpful this could be in time savings.”

When Carroll left to take a position with the Village of New Lenox, Barrowman jumped into the GIS waters. To save the Village of Shorewood money, he asked, “What if we do this in house?”

And that’s what he’s been doing—building a system in-house, working with crews to take survey-grade shots and marking GPS points of all things Shorewood, from street signs to manhole covers. He’s also been attending classes to learn more about how to use GIS and now it’s only a matter of time before Shorewood will be conducting much of its day-to-day work on iPads.

The Village has hired Ruettiger, Tonelli & Associates, a Joliet engineering, design and information technologies firm, to put together an application. Barrowman said the application is expected be functional by the end of 2013.

“It’s a time-saving tool,” he said. “Take the planning department—a developer comes in a goes, ‘We’re interested in developing this parcel. Is their sewer and water available?’

“Now, the planner gets on the GIS system and says, ‘Yep, there is a 12-inch water main at this location. It’s this deep. There is a sanitary sewer at this location—manhole number blah, blah, blah. The invert’s here. The rim is here—at this elevation.’ You can put that in a PDF and send that to their survey people.”

Barrowman said there are almost no limits to how the Village could use GIS, eventually even turning it into a crime-fighting tool.

“It’s an evil animal,” Barrowman said, a grin on his face. “As much as you want to feed it—it will grow. So, that’s where you have to be wise and say, ‘We only want to do this with it.’ Because you could have three or four people doing this all the time—inputting. It’s nothing but data input.

“But, by putting applications on iPads, we don’t need people doing data input. We’re doing it out in the field ourselves. You don’t have to write it down and bring it back to somebody doing data input and putting it in—we’ve got it so you can actually do it in the field.

“So, when you chop down that tree, you can go, ‘Tree removed on this date,’ ” he said. “ ‘Boom!’ Then, when that new tree gets planted, you can put it right back in. You’re not paying somebody to sit in here (in the Village offices) and wait to do something.”

Barrowman said two other projects are high on the Village’s radar right now—the Village is seeking an IEPA loan to build a new water tower; and the Village has implemented a fuel/maintenance system in Public Works that will allow it to better track how many gallons of fuel Village vehicles use and how much it costs to maintain vehicles over their lifespan.

“We never had fuel record before—you just wrote down how many gallons and you on a piece of paper that was kept in the truck,” he said. “So, then, you had to turn that in and somebody had to input that information.

“Now, with the fuel system, you use the last four-digits of your driver’s license. So, there is a security, there’s accountability. There was no accountability before. It’s tied to that vehicle. For budgeting, you used $4,000 for gas last year for that vehicle. Well, that’s the only vehicle in that program. So, now this year, we’re going to budget $4,000 again.”