T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA
Belmont County Geographic Information System Director Anthony Atkins sits in front of his computers displaying the two new applications he created to assist property buyers as well as to document the past.
LLOYDSVILLE — The Belmont County Geographic Information System recently launched two new website features with the goal of making it easier for people to purchase properties that are for sale by the Belmont County auditor and treasurer.
The first is called BelcoSales, and it can be found at belcogis.com. A button on the right side of the main page allows users to view a map of all of the forfeited properties that are for sale by the auditor or treasurer in Belmont County.
“So essentially properties that have been forfeited fall into either two categories, and they put them up for sale,” Belmont County GIS Director Anthony Atkins said.
Atkins said that in the past, people would research the properties they were interested in buying by finding a parcel number or address and physically going to the property. The BelcoSales feature makes it much simpler for the interested party to get an idea whether the forfeited property is something they would seriously be interested in purchasing.
Atkins said he first came up with the idea while browsing the auditor’s sale and seeing a property he was interested in. Once he was able to locate the property on the auditor’s website, he realized that the property he was interested in already had come off the list of available forfeited properties but was still listed on the auditor’s sale website. Once he realized that the website didn’t update regularly, he thought he could come up with a way to automatically update the auditor’s database once the auditor removes a property from the forfeited properties list.
One of the main features of BelcoSales is the inclusion of contour lines. When looking at a property on the map, you’re able to see what kind of slope the property has.
“This is a work in progress, so as more people use it and I get more feedback I will update it with various different tools,” he said.
The second feature that Atkins recently launched is called HistoricalBelco, which is a historical web map that documents the original land owners of Belmont County. Like BelcoSales, it can be found on the right side of the GIS homepage.
The idea for this feature was due to the Belmont County Recorder Jason Garczyk and Belmont County Community Improvement Corp. Director Crystal Lorimor discovering that they were both working on a project in their spare time, looking for the original land owners of Belmont County. The two discovered that they were working on the same effort when Lorimor went to Garczyk’s office asking questions. When Lorimor approached Garczyk about her project, he proceeded to show her that he was working on the same thing. Luckily, they were working on separate parts of the county so their work didn’t overlap. The duo proceeded to team up to finish the project by finding the names of the original land owners based on records found at the Belmont County Bureau of Land Management’s website.
Once all of the names were found the pair contacted Atkins to see if it would be possible to create a digital map to mark where the original land owners’ properties were in Belmont County. Atkins told the two he would be able to if they were able to associate a site with an existing feature. Once he confirmed that their findings could be associated with an existing feature on the Public Land Survey System, he was able to write a script that took their features and mapped them.
“Once I had it mapped and saw it in digital form I said, ‘I bet you this would be neat for a web application,’ and that’s when I created it,” Atkins said.
Atkins said he hopes that the new features will be informational to the public.