Imperial Beach, CA is a small city in San Diego county, California. The GIS department faces budget and staffing challenges common to many small cities. To overcome these challenges, I have used a combination of commercial and open-source software. incorporating a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, and ArcGIS for viewing.

As with any organization, needs change, and these have resulted in moving away from a focus on the desktop, to a web viewer for most GIS needs. As it happens, this platform has its underpinnings firmly in the FOSS arena. At the same time, the timing was right to shift my primary editing and mapping on the desktop to QGIS. Going in the opposite direction to a degree, the need has also arisen to utilize different Esri software to support other city software needs, and thus a process has been developed to transfer data as necessary.

In this presentation I will detail how the GIS is being restructured to serve multiple data endpoints with a minimum of duplication. This is accomplished through a combination of the existing database, moving data to Amazon AWS, and adding some programming to tie it all together. Through it all, the pieces that I do pay for act as a multiplier on the results I would be able to achieve by doing things myself. In many cases, the funds are going to development of applications, or technical support, with concrete benefits, as opposed to paying for licensing. When all is said and done, by judicious utilization of FOSS geospatial, you don't need a huge budget to have a highly flexible, expandable system to meet the needs of multiple departments, staff and software.