Tampa-Hillsborough County Real Estate

County Government Protects its Architectural Archives and Plans for the Future

The Real Estate Department of Tampa-Hillsborough County, FL, was first introduced to DocuVantage™ in 2003 when they saw other application solutions by DocuVantage™ being used within other County departments.

The Real Estate Department is composed of three units: Architectural Services, which handles development of County property; the R3M department (Repair, Renovate, Remodel and Maintain); and the Facilities Management Department, which handles maintenance and furnishings for County facilities.

In its original phase, they envisioned DocuVantage™ deploying an Electronic Document Management system to protect its architectural archives. The architectural archives contain blueprints of all County-owned property. The County currently has 1,079 rolls of plans, each containing between 4 and 150 pages, averaging 35 pages per roll. In addition, there are also 60-70,000 standard size pages of documentation. These blueprints are up to 50 years old, and the older ones are beginning to yellow and decay.

However, once the Real Estate Department learned that DocuVantage™ applications were being implemented within other County departments, the project was enlarged to consider solutions throughout the entire department.

From this reconsideration came three distinct phases, with a possible fourth. In preparation for these phases, the county purchased over $60,000 in system hardware including a large-format scanning station, a full-size plotter, 3 high-speed flatbed scanners and 2 medium-size printers. In addition, the Department has 3 terabytes of available storage space.

Phase 1 was the Architectural Archives project. The first step was to have all existing 1,079 plans scanned by a third-party to convert them to electronic images; thereafter, ongoing scanning will be done by the County. Approximately 25-30 Real Estate Department employees utilize the EDM application on their desktops.

Phase 2 involved Real Estate Tech Services. Within this group are property managers, land agents and technical staff. They are responsible for buying and selling County land. This department currently has 17 filing cabinets of documentation for existing County-owned properties, which again was scanned for electronic storage and retrieval.

The third phase of the project was to convert Survey & Mapping files. These include Right-of-Way records, thousands of pages of blueprints, as well as 72,000 aperture cards containing microfiche records.

Using the DocuVantage™ system for its effortless scan, store and retrieve functionality eases the workload of County personnel while minimizing the space needed for files instead to a more productive use of their real estate.