Throw a dart at a map of Tennessee. You will probably hit somewhere that is growing. Nashville’s outskirts are projected to add a quarter to their population in the next 15 years. The Ford Motor Company has begun construction on the BlueOval City manufacturing plant outside of Memphis. A multibillion-dollar uranium enrichment facility has broken ground in the Knoxville exurbs.
Tennessee growing at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. does not surprise anyone who issues residential building permits in the state. Inspectors at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) saw requests for subsurface sewage disposal system services jump 18% in one year. “It’s a monumental, staggering rate to grow,” said Steve Owens, the TDEC environmental consultant tasked with expediting service delivery across the state.
Owens, a meteorologist by training, hydrologist by virtue, and self-taught geographic information system (GIS) engineer by practice, streamlined the work of TDEC inspectors with enterprise GIS technology. With it, a team of fewer than 100 inspectors processed over 23,000 requests last year in Tennessee’s rural fringe communities.
Designing a System Around How Inspectors Work
About one in five Americans lives in a home that relies on a septic system. They are built in remote areas too far to connect to municipal sewage systems, which happen to be the places where Tennessee is growing the fastest. High demand for housing created a sense of urgency to issue permits as swiftly — and as safely — as possible.
Owens spent his early career in a truck as a septic permit inspector. “It’s hard work,” he said from his Memphis office. “You’re dealing with outdoor conditions all day and you’re never working fast enough.”
Inspectors often eat lunch in their trucks while driving to their next site. The septic systems that they design, permit and inspect treat wastewater from homes and businesses. These systems must be well suited to the specific soil conditions of the land to work properly. When evaluating proposed subdivisions, inspectors conduct a range of fieldwork assessments — such as soil profiles, percolation data, and absorption rates — all while answering calls from the public.
A malfunctioning or ill-fitted septic system can pollute wells of drinking water and springs. Foul-smelling sewage can pool on the surface, creating a breeding ground for parasites, mosquitoes and other vectors that can spread pathogens to neighbors and pets.
A June 2024 TDEC audit of drip dispersal systems documented more than 400 site visits in a short time frame. Inspectors used an ArcGIS enterprise program to compare standard observations and record site-specific notes and photographs at each site. Results are filtered and displayed on an interactive map.
The audit represents a fraction of the work that TDEC permit inspectors do. Complaint investigations, repair designs, and expansion assessments are among the 13 different types of services inspectors deliver each day. To modernize, Owens configured an enterprise GIS to manage the full scope of operational data for those services—from how residents make requests, to how inspectors execute the work and get documentation to the customer, to how management reports progress.
“It’s different from the typical mapping and analysis you might associate with GIS,” Owens said. “We’re utilizing ArcGIS Survey123 and ArcGIS Dashboards to create an efficient ecosystem for what we do with our work and how to get that work out to the public.”
A “Flintstones to Jetsons” Digital Transformation
As recently as seven years ago, Tennessee septic permit data existed entirely on paper. Pulling a permit meant driving to a state office in the county seat and making photocopies. Digitization came with an announcement from the governor that made headlines across the state. Trucks hauled away filing cabinets full of septic records, and technicians scanned their contents to create a FileNet public document system of record. “We have gone from Flintstones to Jetsons in the last decade,” Owens said.
In the past, permit requests came to TDEC inspectors as a list of addresses and contact information. Inspectors started each day punching addresses into online mapping sites, guessing at an efficient route. Their days ended back at the office to log their time, update templates, and input data into various spreadsheets.
In high-growth counties, where multiple inspectors collaborate to tackle a significant workload, they often duplicated efforts. “It would not be uncommon for someone to go out to a site on Wednesday, and the next guy would go out there on Friday and not know the work had already been done,” Owens said.
Owens considered the extensive manual processes involved in permit inspections. Having used GIS technology for environmental impact assessments for other TDEC projects, he knew the work could be automated. “We had already been using mobile GIS tools for some time at that point, so staff were used to it,” Owens explained. “I thought we could utilize a lot of the tools that Esri already has built in and customize it a little bit to meet our needs.”
Conversations with TDEC managers confirmed the hunch. Inspectors were spending up to two hours each day planning their routes and logging what they had done. “It ended up being somewhere about 34,000 hours a calendar year just figuring out where we’re going and tracking what we do,” Owens said.
The project to upgrade the workflow with GIS would pay for itself in eight months if they could cut the tracking and logging time in half.
Automating Data Editing and Management Workflows
Owens envisioned a system that would link service requests to jobsite workflows. He designed configurable applications for inspectors to use for data collection. Permit and inspection data would integrate into an enterprise geodatabase that serves as a source of truth for TDEC septic service requests. The database would sync to the public document viewer.
In the new GIS-based system, residents and developers make permit service requests by filling out an online application. The system then locates the request, assigns an inspector, and sends the appropriate form that guides the inspection work. Inspectors check the boxes, record the test results, upload photos and drawings, and issue letters and certificates—all from tablets in the field.
Submitting the completed permit or inspection through ArcGIS Survey123 generates PDFs that automatically go to the applicant, TDEC staff, and the database that syncs to the public site.
“The real gem is for staff to be able to plan their day by using a map instead of entering all that data into online map tools and seeing what they come up with for their route,” Owens said. The map is part of a real-time operations dashboard with hundreds of requests dotted across Tennessee.
Points colored with darker hues alert inspectors to older requests—fees are waived if they are not completed within 45 days. All the related information—requester contact, location data, violations, resolutions, test results, and historical records—is organized by location. “This used to be done in spreadsheets and file cabinets so it’s a huge time-saver,” Owens said.
When management sees clusters of requests on the map, they know it is time to reallocate resources. “They can pull in inspectors from other counties to get the work done, and then go back to normal workload,” Owens added.
Management watches a splash page that tabulates completed work to keep a pulse on field staff and avoid backlogs. They can drill down on how long specific tasks are taking, and view performance metrics for individual staff members. They pay close attention to the average number of days it takes to issue permits. If the times go up, they have the data to bring to the budget office to justify hiring more inspectors.
Amid Tennessee’s building boom, officials face intense pressure to keep pace and deliver high-quality results. Modernizing their permitting and inspection system has provided TDEC with tangible efficiency gains to present to legislators and the public.
“This was a major investment in our division, and we want to let them know that, ‘we hear you,’” Owens said. “We can show how much work that we have done to address those concerns, and the output speaks for itself.”
This year, TDEC was awarded honorable mention by the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) in the State Innovation category for their septic permitting modernization project.
Learn more about how state and local governments use GIS to empower environmental compliance.
This article originally appeared at Esri Blog.
