When the finance department at the Greater Salt Lake Municipal Services District came to the GIS team last summer with a request that they pass their year-end audit, nobody expected it would spark one of the district’s most celebrated technical achievements. But that’s exactly what happened, as senior GIS analysts Marie Schleicher and James Burton, along with GIS analyst Mike Bova, explained in a recent conversation about their journey.
An Unlikely Beginning
The team hadn’t set out to overhaul the district’s asset management. For years, MSD had leaned on Salt Lake County Public Works to supply data on public infrastructure, but oftentimes, the information trickled in due to standard government data‑sharing practices, which made it harder to verify and often left it lagging behind current conditions. When the director of finance walked in needing audit-ready numbers, the GIS department realized the only way forward was to bring the entire effort in-house.
Schleicher, who has spent three years at MSD building out Esri-based address management and centerline tracking/inventory systems, took the lead in explaining how the pieces came together. Burton, with four and a half years at the district and a drone program of his own creation, and Bova, newer to the field but deeply embedded in the engineering side of GIS work, rounded out the effort. Each bringing a different piece of expertise to a project that would eventually touch nearly every corner of the organization.
Turning Street Video into a Living Database
The breakthrough came from an unexpected place: a free, open-source tool called Mapillary. By mounting a 360-degree GoPro camera and simply driving through their jurisdictions once, the team captured street-level imagery that could then be fed into ArcGIS Pro through a Mapillary plugin. From there, the software’s built-in AI took over, automatically detecting and extracting assets like catch basins, streetlights, and crosswalks directly from the footage.
What made the process so powerful, the team explained, was the ability to overlay these newly detected assets against existing databases. Buffers helped identify which points were duplicates, which were missing entirely, and which represented genuinely new discoveries. For street signs, an entire category the district had virtually no data on before, Mapillary became the sole source of truth.
The time savings were dramatic, though the team is careful to note it wasn’t the automated detection alone that did the work. It was the elimination of manual field collection altogether. Instead of sending staff out repeatedly to walk or drive every street cataloging assets by hand, the team drove each corridor a single time and let the office-based review process handle the rest. Human review is still necessary, because someone has to confirm whether a light sits on a metal or wooden pole or whether an asset is publicly or privately owned, and an intern, Santiago Olmedo, took on much of that verification work, checking extracted points against the imagery to ensure accuracy.
Drones as a Reality Check
While the street-level imagery formed the backbone of the inventory, the team’s drone program added another layer of confidence. Burton described using drones especially during new development projects, flying over freshly installed infrastructure to capture a dated snapshot of what had actually gone into the ground. That timestamp turns out to be one of the most valuable parts of the process, because the team can point to an image and say definitively, “this is what existed on this date,” then use that record to confirm as-built plans against reality.
It’s not yet a systematic, district-wide practice, but on a project-by-project basis, the drone imagery has already proven itself as a fast, reliable way to catch discrepancies before they become long-term problems.
Why Other Municipalities Should Take Notice
Ask the team what advice they’d offer to other municipalities eyeing a similar overhaul, and the answer comes quickly: it’s remarkably cheap. The entire hardware investment amounted to a single GoPro camera. Bova, drawing on his prior experience at another Salt Lake County municipality, offered a stark comparison where there, three interns spent an entire summer manually inspecting street signs and managed to cover only about a third of the city. Using the new workflow, the MSD team covered every municipality in their jurisdiction in the same amount of time.
The return on investment extended well beyond cost savings. Once other departments caught wind of the asset inventory project, it triggered a cascade of new ideas and collaborations. The engineering department, for instance, ended up with a custom centerline moratorium dashboard built specifically because of conversations that started around the asset data. The team emphasized that this kind of cross-departmental sharing is often where the real value lies, because once people see what’s possible with clean, current data, they start imagining their own applications for it.
Some of the most interesting discoveries were things nobody had planned for. Having a complete sign inventory, for example, let the team locate every speed bump in their jurisdictions simply by cataloging speed bump warning signs, which is information that hadn’t existed anywhere before. Similarly, having full signage data allowed them to build intersection control layers that traffic engineers could use directly. As the team put it, you don’t know what value you’ll uncover until you’re already in the data.
Putting a Price Tag on Infrastructure
Perhaps the most tangible outcome of the entire project has been the ability to finally assign dollar values to the district’s infrastructure, the very thing that started this whole effort. Since the initiative began with finance’s audit requirements, the team made sure the resulting data could support exactly that kind of valuation. Santiago Olmedo, the team’s intern, managed to join finance department records with GIS data despite the two systems sharing no common unique identifiers, relying instead on matching shape lengths, a feat the team said earned him an award all his own.
The numbers that resulted are striking: sidewalk infrastructure in Magna, one of the district’s larger jurisdictions, is now valued at roughly $35 million. Before this project, none of that would have been quantifiable. Now, the district can track these values precisely, satisfying the very audit requirements that started the whole endeavor in the first place and setting up an ongoing model for annual reporting going forward.
Recognition and What Comes Next
The work didn’t go unnoticed. The team won the Best Use of GIS award at the Utah Digital Government Summit, and the resulting MSD Assets app, a public-facing web map showcasing the district’s street assets and data, stands as the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of workflow innovation underneath.
Looking ahead, the team is most energized about closing the loop between asset installation and data collection in real time. Their vision involves integrating with Cityworks, the district’s permitting software, so that inspectors examining new installations could trigger a notification for the GIS team to capture GPS or drone data on-site, during installation, rather than trying to reconstruct that information later. It’s a step that could edge the district closer to true digital twin status, something the team acknowledges is still likely years away, but not out of reach.
One near-term priority is the district’s storm water system, large sections of which remain undocumented. The team already has a willing collaborator, a storm water employee eager to help collect field data, and hopes that kind of grassroots buy-in from staff across departments will be the key to expanding the program further.
A Model Built on Sharing
If there’s one thread running through the entire conversation, it’s the power of transparency. Time and again, the team credited their success not just to the technology, but to their willingness to share results widely with finance, with engineering, with anyone curious about what the data could reveal. That openness, they suggested, is what turns a single compliance project into an organization-wide transformation, and it’s the same principle they hope will carry their work forward into whatever unexpected challenge comes next.
The team closed with a nod to their intern, Santiago Olmedo, whose meticulous verification work underpinned much of the project’s success. A reminder that even the most innovative workflows still depend on someone willing to get their hands dirty in the data, and it’s often your intern.
