Managing ROW and Easements with ArcGIS
Managing ROW and Easements with ArcGIS
by: Kevin Ruggiero
Introduction
Your company is managing an expansion of a new pipeline. Within this expansion, your organization needs to acquire Right-of-Way (ROW) to design and build the new pipeline. This requires the need for your organization to understand the location of any existing ROW agreements. It also requires the management of acquisition and accountability that you have the necessary agreements in place for the full extent of the new pipeline. Critical to these processes is continuity. You do not want to have to stop construction because you found out that there is a gap in your ROW agreements and permits authorizing this new construction.
What is Right-Of-Way?
Right-Of-Way are parcels or property that your organization has an agreement with the Landowner to use part of the property for your utility to traverse. It's operationally critical to have the current document of record of your ROW for easy access. Management of this data including links to the supporting documents, are vital for the responsibility of the ROW Department within your organization.
In general, Right-Of-Way is defined as:
- A Right of passage over another’s land – a type of easement granted or reserved over the land for transportation purposes, such as highways, public footpath, rail transport, canal as well as electrical transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines.
- Land acquired by a railroad for tracks
- Land covered by a public road.
What do Utility Companies Manage?
Right-of-Way management within a utility is often described as managing the three R’s. These three R’s are: Rights, Responsibilities, and Restrictions.
Rights - The ROW on the property for which you have access. Who is allowed to access the property, or its parts. These may sometimes be in the form of Agreements, and some may be a purchase of real property.
Responsibilities – Who is responsible for maintaining the ROW. Some examples would be, who is responsible for cutting the grass, manicuring or other responsibilities.
Restrictions – What restrictions are against the ROW? Some examples: Time of planting and harvesting may have restrictions on when you can cross through a ROW to access a transmission tower. There may be a vegetation restriction, vegetation growth could affect the ROW operation, as far as access to the ROW.
Is your department tasked with managing your organizations ROW, Agreements and Easements? If so, Esri has a solution that may help you manage these assets.
ROW and Easement Data Management Solution in ArcGIS
To help you administer your land assets and easily share this information to your organization, Esri Solutions have developed a ROW and Easement Data Management solution to help manage these records.
The ROW and Easement Data Management is a solution, it accelerates implementation by giving you preset layers, domains (ROW and Easement Types) and a flexible data model organizations can implement with their existing ROW data.
This solution will help you:
- Streamline your ROW and Easement Data management workflows.
- Improve interagency collaboration with access to the current ROW data.
This is a configurable solution to fit your needs without customization and is fully supported by technical support. Workflows are built into the solution to help you manage your ROW easily and efficiently. Using preconfigured tasks’, use these for your workflow or configure them for your workflows within your organization.
The deployment steps are well outlined in Esri online documentation that is available here. As seen in the image below, Tasks walk you through the configuration of the solution.
Flexible Data Model
The solution ships with Rights-of-Way, Easement, Subdivision, Tax Parcels layers as Parcel Types within the solution. The ROW solution has predefined Parcel Types as Rights-Of-Way, Easements, Parcels, Subdivisions and Condos. Each parcel type can have its own schema and behaviors. Configure the solution to add specific new Parcel Types, such as Agreements or Construction Areas as well as edit the scheme of the existing layers to match what you currently manage in your existing ROW geodatabase. This is a flexible model that you can define to match your organizational needs. Some examples of this could be:
- Adding related behaviors and additional attributes to parcel types
- Using groups in ArcGIS Enterprise to manage editing and viewing access.
- Configure attribute rules and constraints to maintain data integrity.
- Working in two dimensions (2D), three dimensions (3D), and changes over time (4D).
Once you have your data organized and updated, this data can be used by other departments within your organization.
Organization Collaboration
Publishing the current document of record or current active ROW parcels to ArcGIS Online or your portal, enables groups within your organization access to specific webmaps, such as Vegetation Management, Pipeline Marking, Tree Trimming and anyone who requires access to current ROW data to perform their jobs.
The solution deploys an experience builder application that you hydrate the feature services from your active ROW layers with tasks that ship with the solution. This allows for easy access by users within your organization for both internal and field access to ROW records.
In Summary
By implementing the ROW and Easement Management Solution, situations like having gaps within a ROW of new construction, can be avoided by understanding the state of your ROW. Understanding the Rights, Responsibilities and Restrictions as well as supporting documentation for your current Land Holdings is operationally critical. I you to try it out for yourself! You can pilot it in a file geodatabase so see how it would benefit your organization.
If you are responsible for managing ROW, Easement, Agreements or any other form of Land Management, please check out the ROW and Easement Solution.
