RESPEC Project

The Coon Creek Watershed District (CCWD) was established in 1959 and is approximately 94 square miles located entirely in Anoka County, Minnesota. The CCWD encompasses portions of five cities, with a combined population of approximately 159,000 people and a diverse makeup of dense urban land use in the south to agricultural in the north. In 2009, the RESPEC team became the GIS coordinators for the watershed district.

RESPEC’s GIS team has provided GIS support to the CCWD since 2009. Initially, the RESPEC team performed a GIS needs assessment and implementation plan to structurally organize the GIS data for upgrading to geodatabase file format. RESPEC designed the GIS to emulate the four core business areas for the watershed: (1) Development Regulations and Issue, (2) Operations and Maintenance, (3) Plan Program Budget, and (4) Public and Government Relations. This design allowed the CCWD staff to access data from a structure they were most familiar with.

RESPEC is responsible for all aspects of coordinating the GIS for the CCWD, which includes software installation; application development; task automation; data updating, management, and creation; database modeling and creation; cartography; wetland delineation; hydrologic and three-dimensional modeling; permitting tracking; asset management; field data collection; and training. With on-site presence, RESPEC can better understand the needs of the CCWD staff and provide responsive service; daily GIS requests are responded to quickly. Annual kickoff meetings are held to plan for larger projects that are beyond daily maintenance tasks or staff needs. The latest remote-desktop technology is employed to access the CCWD’s network for instances when work needs to be performed while off site. Not only does the CCWD staff have access to RESPEC’s on-site staff, but it has access to our entire team for sharing knowledge and collaboratively solving problems.

RESPEC has a broad range of software to use at the watershed district. Additionally, our experts use advanced GIS tools, such as ArcHydro, Spatial Analyst, and 3D Analyst. Major initiatives we have solved for the CCWD include the following:

• Performed a Functions and Values assessment based on a white paper titled A Rapid Procedure for Assessing Wetland Functional Capacity
• Analyzed properties and residents within flood-prone areas to obtain population and property values
• Prepared water infrastructure for loading into XP-SWMM for hydrologic modeling
• Tracked aquatic invasive species
• Monitored potentially endangered species
• Provided natural disaster analysis
• Automated analysis of permitted areas.