The GIS Guide for Elected Officials is a go-to resource for government officials who want to better understand how the power of GIS can be leveraged to answer their constituents' questions. Such questions often require location-based information for answers: Can work crews respond more efficiently to service calls? Where do police and fire department calls for service originate? Does citizen satisfaction with city services vary across the community? Are calls for service originating from the same neighbourhood about the same problem, and why?

Including more than fifty real-life use cases, these stories offer ample evidence of the wide range of problems GIS can help solve. Examples include stories about determining potential markets for a start-up business in Littleton, Colorado; responding to the needs of special populations groups within the community during a disaster in Fort Worth, Texas; and identifying urban food deserts in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Designed as a peer-to-peer information sharing effort to enable governments to learn from the experience of others, this volume also includes a review of what it takes to build and maintain a strong GIS programme especially in light of rapidly changing technology and shrinking government budgets.