City of Southfield Michigan
Solve city stormwater challenges
How OHM Advisors helped the city of Southfield, Michigan, effectively manage stormwater utilities with Nearmap location intelligence.
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About OHM Advisors
Founded in 1962, OHM Advisors is the community advancement firm. With a team of over 700 multidisciplinary experts, the firm delivers award-winning work across the architecture, engineering, planning, urban design, landscape architecture, surveying, and construction engineering spheres. With offices across multiple states, OHM Advisors partners with government leaders, school districts, developers, universities, and private companies to create great places for people.
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About City of Southfield
Southfield, MI is at the forefront of urban development — with over 10,000 businesses and a vibrant, diverse population. Known for its robust economy and thriving commercial centers, Southfield exemplifies modern urban living and innovation.
The challenge
Effectively managing urban stormwater
A customer of OHM, the City of Southfield, struggled to manage urban stormwater. The city is currently in the planning stages of considering a new initiative to assess stormwater fees based on the number of impervious surfaces — like asphalt and concrete. These surfaces do not allow water to penetrate the ground and contribute to increased runoff and strain municipal systems.
However, Southfield struggled with several critical issues:
- Inadequate funding: Financial limitations hindered the city’s ability to maintain or upgrade its stormwater infrastructure.
- Reliance on outdated data: The city was relying on years-old aerial imagery, leading to inefficient resource allocation and hampered development efforts.
- High data costs: Updating aerial data traditionally required Southfield to contract one-time flyovers, which is cost prohibitive — especially at the city scale. Custom flights can cost up to $80k-100k.
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“We had aerials from 2020 provided by the county and some from 2023 online, but there was nothing in between or anything more recent.”
— Steve Gogola, GIS Coordinator, City of Southfield
The solution
Accurate imagery and AI feature layers
Nearmap location intelligence includes high-resolution imagery – captured up to 3 times a year – geospatial data, and AI feature layers. OHM introduced these solutions to Southfield, enabling the city to proactively map impervious surfaces. The ability to readily view, identify, and verify stormwater utilities at scale resulted in a highly accurate and equitable system for assessing fees based on near-real-time data.
This helped Southfield with:
- Strategic decision-making: Using Nearmap marked a pivotal shift towards high-tech urban planning, enhancing precision and efficiency.
- Planning efficiency: With Nearmap, city planners could complete tasks remotely, allowing them to focus more on critical stormwater management and less on fieldwork.
- Enhanced geospatial services: OHM utilized Nearmap aerial imagery and AI feature layers to chart Southfield’s impervious surfaces, modernizing fee assessments with accurate and data-driven insights.
- Technical ingenuity: Nearmap seamlessly integrated into Southfield’s existing GIS systems, replacing their outdated insights with current aerial intelligence.
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Business impact
Surfacing the right insights
Together, Nearmap and OHM identified every impervious surface with the power of current aerial imagery, geospatial data, and AI data. Now, Southfield can:
- Accurately assess stormwater fees: Analysis of Nearmap imagery and AI data allowed OHM to establish a precise, data-backed fee structure — tying impervious surface area to stormwater fees and bolstering Southfield’s stormwater infrastructure funding.
- Reduce costs: Nearmap offered a cost-effective alternative to traditional data collection, drastically reducing the city’s expenditure without sacrificing data quality.
- Enhance urban planning: Access to Nearmap facilitated remote decision-making, allowing Southfield to optimize its urban planning.
- Maintain consistent data: OHM and Nearmap led to the resolution of Southfield’s data discrepancies, ensuring reliable insights for future planning.
The collaboration between OHM Advisors and Nearmap marked a significant transformation in Southfield’s approach to stormwater management, illustrating the transformative potential of advanced technology in urban governance. As Southfield ushers in a new era of data-driven decision-making, Nearmap stands out as the right partner for cities aspiring to embrace sustainable and financially sound solutions to enhance their infrastructure.
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