Carbon County parcel mapping resources have been available online for quite some time, but what happens when someone needs information on a property in another county?

Thanks to the Carbon County GIS office, led by Jason Shellhammer, that one-stop shop for all 67 Pennsylvania counties is available by visiting the recently published Pennsylvania GIS Resource website at https://bit.ly/3kMyc1l. A video demonstration of how to use the Pennsylvania GIS Resource is available to watch on the Carbon County GIS Facebook page.

“What this basically is if you went to the website for Butler County or Allegheny, Erie, Montgomery, Lehigh, you would have to spend some time going through there and figuring out where the mapping applications are,” Shellhammer said. “So what we did was go through all 67 counties’ sites and we more or less cataloged all of that and created a nice convenient map that sits in something called the Pennsylvania GIS Resource.”

For example, Shellhammer said, if someone lives in Carbon County, but they are looking at purchasing a piece of property in another county, they can go right away to that respective county and find the mapping information that they have readily available.”

Parcel maps are the bread and butter for each county, but, depending on the region, people can access more specialized maps.

“I know in Allegheny County they really focus on mapping areas with landslide related issues,” Shellhammer said.

“If you go to Bucks County, for instance, they’re really focused on growing their tourism there and bringing focus to their rails to trails. We’re really working hard on getting things out about our agricultural related things such as pumpkin patches and produce places, celebrating our local restaurants and bringing attention to things that would help the local economy. I don’t think people realize this is such a cool tool and the things you can do with it.”

The project started around five years ago, when Shellhammer noticed there were a lot of counties that had GIS resources online, whether it be parcel maps or hiking trails, etc. Carbon County, however, did not have that information online.

“Once we did get that online, I said you know what, I bet you there are other county folks like me, that still don’t have stuff online, but would love to do that,” he said. “Let me help those guys out and share this with them.”

When Carbon GIS intern Lauren Babinetz came on board this summer, Shellhammer finally had the manpower to get the statewide GIS Resource finished.

“Now it sits there on the site available for anybody to use for free,” Shellhammer said.

“We have, so far, got a ton of really good kudos from it. In fact, we even had somebody from the U.S. Department of State reach out as well to say, hey this is really great stuff.”

Since the GIS Resource was created on Aug. 22, around 300 users have accessed it.

Shellhammer said he hopes to eventually take the project even further for access to all United States counties.

“It’s like one of those Forrest Gump moments,” he said. “I ran this far with it, why not keep going.”