Many communities are experiencing rapid population growth. Building and property development are accelerating.  Consequently in these municipalities, planning and community development departments must cope with a deluge of time sensitive, complex and often minute information management resulting from impact fees and other proffers negotiated in the public interest.

A company in Charlottesville, Technology Tamers Inc., has developed a solution for dealing with the data overhead of this growth. For understaffed and overwhelmed planners, it holds the promise of making work a lot easier. Their product LandAccord^© monitors the progress of evolving proffers and tracks current and pending agreements through easy to use forms and reports tied to a Microsoft SQL Server database.
LandAccord^© is currently in use at the County of Albemarle in Virginia.  It has been deployed to relieve the manual burden of managing complex time and event driven matters pertaining to proffer agreements. As tax map and parcels change, merge and split the inherited proffers remain associated with the new land divisions.  LandAccord^© works interactively with existing datasets, (Albemarle use Municipal Software’s CityView) that track planning applications and building permits.  The data exchange is seamless in this instance. Integration with GIS systems is also easy to accomplish.  Notification to various proffer stakeholders (e.g. impacted school officials, parks and recreation contacts, and VDOT representatives) via MS Outlook automation speeds processes, information sharing and accountability. Query and reporting features filtered by various attributes (type, category, stakeholder, ZMA number, Tax map & parcel series, date series, money, status, etc.) also help to facilitate timely research and alleviate tedious labor-intensive effort by Planners and their support staff.
What’s next for LandAccord^©?  Marita Singer-Owens, President of Technology Tamers and the system developer, plans to incorporate historic site and resource information in the next iteration of the application.  Other improvements are on the way.  Marita summarizes LandAccord’s strategy: “Our goal is to remove much of the paper trail chase out of the planners’ day so they have time to think, collaborate and execute their vision for better communities.”  Contact: Doug Owens - Director Technology Tamers Inc.  434-293-3377

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