Our organization uses the merge tool for many types of parcel updates including consolidation of ownership/property parcels and changes to local zoning parcels. Typically, during these updates, we want to preserve the attributes of one of the parcels, while also creating a historic version of both parcels so that the original state of both the parcels can be maintained.
Currently, the options with the Merge tool are:
- Merge into a new parcel – which will create the history but doesn’t allow you to use the attributes from one of the existing parcels, so it has to be manually attributed
- Merge into an existing feature – which allows you to maintain the attributes of one of the parcels but does not create historic parcels, so the historic parcels have to be manually created beforehand
The workflow we are using to ensure that we get the history for both parcels that are being merged while not having to re-attribute the merged parcel is:
- Ensure there is an active record
- Select both parcels that will be merged
- Run Duplicate Parcels to create a copy of the parcels
- Select the two existing parcels (that are not associated with the active record but associated with other records)
- Run Set Historic for both original parcels
- Select the two duplicated parcels (related to the active record)
- Run Merge using ‘Existing Features’ and select the parcel with the attributes we need to preserve
Ideally, we would like to have the option to create history and preserve the attributes of one of the parcels. If the ‘Existing Features’ option had the ‘Keep original features’ checkbox that the ‘New Feature’ option has, we would be able to create history and preserve the attributes we need which would greatly simplify our workflow.
