This year the City of Highland Parked moved from doing street sweeping in house to contracting out the service. It was important to provide information to the contractor that showed how often certain streets needed to be swept. For example, curbed streets are swept monthly while uncurbed streets are only swept twice a year. Arterial and other major roads are swept once per week.

The City of Highland Park recently developed a business page for their website. The purpose of the page is to promote Highland Park as a great place to establish new businesses. Providing the location available for commercial leasing is an excellent way to assist a businessperson with locating a good area to start their business.

The City of Highland Park has an ongoing program to restore ravines in order to prevent further degradations. Some of the issues they are addressing are slope failure, exposed sewer pipes, pollution discharge, and channel scouring. If these are left uncheck the ravines will continue to degrade, thus threatening the stability of nearby structures and increasing the amount of debris dumped into Lake Michigan.

The Special Service Area 16 came up for it’s first three year review in the Spring of 2010. The City Manager required methods to determine if the Special Service Area had fulfilled it’s goal of maintaining an economically vibrant downtown. He decided that a study of the location units used for retail, services, office, and vacant units would supply the required information

An accurate inventory of sign locations is crucial for keeping roads safe for driving. Missing signs or faded signs can lead to motorists missing important warnings about road hazards.

Within the GIS, manmade features such as buildings, bridges, railroads, and roads are classified as planimetric data. The city contracts with Ayres Associates to update planimetric features for about twenty-five percent of the City each year. This ensures that none of the base mapping within the city is older than 5 years. Updated base map layers are important to ensure that new construction and redevelopment area are accurately reflected in the base map features.

The City of Highland Parks contains a vibrant downtown full of many service-orientated businesses that wish to provide outdoor seating for their customers. The City of Highland Park requires these businesses to apply for a permit, which allows outdoor seating. One of the main purposes of the permit is ensuring that the outdoor seating locations do not cause a public safety hazard by obstructing the pedestrian traffic or by being too close to the street

The City of Highland Park is a vibrant downtown full of businesses that attract many visitors. Because the downtown contains many buildings, it is often difficult to locate a specific business. The Highland Park Chamber of Commence decided to use business directory to aid people with locating specific businesses. There are four directories located throughout the downtown area. They are similar to Shopping Mall Store Directories in that they list a location of a business and provide a map for referencing that location.

The City of Highland Parks runs the Taste of Highland in conjunction with the Port Clinton Art Festival. The Taste of Highland provides an opportunity for local food related establishments to sell food products and allow people to taste their food products. Thus, it is an excellent opportunity for vendors to gain exposure to potential new customers. Both events are important annual events in the greater Chicago area. These events attract hundreds of thousands of people and thus need to be well planned to ensure everyone remains safe, while enjoying themselves at the Taste of Highland Park Event.

The City of Highland Park Department of Community Development Planning Division is in the process of creating a new master plan for the continual development of the Central Business District. Building mass is one of the issues currently under review for this plan. Building mass is the study of size, height. and volume of buildings within an area to gauge the density of commercial and residential use with in that particular area.

The City of Highland is very responsive to residents concerns of basement flooding and sewer backups during heavy rain events. The major issue is storm water infiltration of the wastewater sewers exceeding the wastewater sewer’s carrying capacity. Damaged or aging wastewater laterals are a major source of this infiltration.

The City of Highland Park Fire Department is considering relocating one of their three fire stations where they can build a larger station. Moving this fire station will affect the response times within the community. In order to help understand the extent to which the new fire department will alter the response times, the city enlisted the help of the Geographical Information System (GIS) Department.

The City of Highland Park Fire Department needed to identify specific types of building structures for their International City/County Management Association (ICMA) accreditation. Specifically the ICMA required structure counts of building use, such as residential or commercial, and a classification of the building as a primary or secondary structure. For example, a single family home is a primary structure where as any garages or sheds related to the house are secondary structures.

The City of Highland Park, IL Manager’s office has recently required the need to visually display each city owned parking lot in a map format and publish these maps to the city’s website. Although their original methodology of publishing PDF maps of these parking lots would initially work, the city believed that the organization of these maps could become confusing when combined with all of the other content on the city’s webpage. After multiple meetings with the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department the city decided the best way to organize the information was to create a Google Map containing a point location for each city owned parking lot. From there, the parking lot data points would then contain all of the necessary space designation counts for each parking lot as well as a link to a corresponding PDF maps. The benefit of doing it this way was to keep all parking lot information centrally located and easy to find.