For more than 20 years, there has been an office in the basement of the Clark County Courthouse which can generate nearly any kind of map of the county.

Clark County Geographic Information Systems Coordinator Stephen Berry has been working in the office since 2001, keeping the databases, technology and maps up to date for every inch of Clark County.

Berry is also partly responsible for creating the county’s walk-bike plan, which encourages sidewalks and connecting parks and walking trails throughout Clark County.

Winchester Sun: How long have you worked in Clark County?

Stephen Berry: I started working in 2001, so 18 years I’ve been working for the Clark County GIS Consortium.

WS: How did GIS come to exist in Clark County?

SB: There was a time in the late 1990s where GIS was a buzzword. There were a lot of grant funds available for it.

There was a large push for it throughout the public sector to bring GIS, which had been a planning tool, out into other parts of government operations and maintenance.

Through the Bluegrass Area Development District and the City of Winchester and their association, I believe Gene Kincaid was mayor and Ed Burtner was city manager, they got interested in the technology and went forward to form the consortium and gather partners such as the PVA and Winchester Municipal Utilities to partner on an organization that could provide information on their assets and help with their operations and maintenance.

WS: Did you go to school to learn mapping?

SB: I graduated from the University of Georgia back in 1995. That was right before GIS was a commonly used tool.

I graduated with a geography degree and I did study information systems and geographic information systems on my own within my degree program.

These days there are GIS certificate programs that are specific for geographic information, but at that time, you got a geography degree and moved on.

WS: Are you from Georgia?

SB: I grew up in Clark County, Georgia, Athens, Georgia. It was funny. The city manager in Athens, Georgia, was a fellow named Al Crase. He was from Winchester. I worked at the planning office in Athens as an intern right out of college. It was strange I ended up working here.

WS: How did you wind up in Winchester?

SB: I took a job in Maysville, Kentucky, back in the late 1990s working for a software company. That job came to an end.

I worked for Nolin RECC as a contract employee serving Fort Knox. Through some of my contacts in that job, I heard of the opening here in Clark County.

At that time, my current wife was living in Berea and Clark County was closer than Elizabethtown.

I decided to check it out and I found out what the job was about and it sounded perfect for me.

That’s why I’m still here because it’s the best job for myself I could possibly imagine.

WS: What does GIS do?

SB: We make maps and use computers to do that.

Anything that’s on Earth has a location. We use those locations and give information to those locations.

A house, for example, has a certain number of bedrooms, a certain number of bathrooms and a certain square footage. That’s information that can be added to the house, which can be shown on the map as a location.

Through computer technology, you can pull all that up and join it together. You go to the map, you click on the house and it gives you information about the house.

GIS is the marriage between locations and all the different characteristics for that location.

WS: Can anyone come in and ask for a map of their land?

SB: We are a public office. Anyone is welcome to come in and sit with us … and ask any questions and look at anything we have on record.

Our only detail we have is if they carry something out of our office, a piece of paper with ink on it, they have to pay for it. It’s reasonable. We do prints for people of their properties and we do reprints of some of the maps we do.

There are certain regulations that cover different types of utilities for security concerns as far as homeland security. There’s stuff called critical infrastructure like water systems and sewer systems. Those can’t be freely given out … without the knowledge of the utility. There’s no determination of what they’re using it for. We have to be aware and know the data has been released. If it ever unfortunately becomes an issue, we know one time we did give data out.

WS: Who do you do the most work for?

SB: It depends on the types of projects our partners are doing.

Our partners are the Clark County PVA, the Clark County Fiscal Court, the City of Winchester, Winchester Municipal Utilities and the school board is a junior partner.

It’s up and down as far as what types of projects each partner is doing.

We also help with some basic IT work, so we do work for the fiscal court if they get new computers.

WMU has monthly programs they need  support on (like) their sanitary sewer television program. They do inspections on all the sewer lines. Once a month, they have to download all the information and I help with that.

Right now, we’re working on storm sewer mapping for the city. We’re getting public works a set of maps they can carry around in the truck and locate storm sewer lines.

We’re also getting the database up to date so the city manager and public works can go on a computer and locate those storm sewer facilities from an iPad or an iPhone.

WS: How did you get involved with Walk-Bike Clark County?

SB: A lot of the walk-bike (activity) goes back to mapping. A 5K needs a route. A route needs a map. I have been asked to do a lot of maps for 5Ks and bike activities in the past.

I’d say in 2015, I decided to get more involved in stitching all these partners together because a few of these things arose.

One was a chamber of commerce question. They used to have a wellness committee, and I was invited to a meeting to show a map of all the walking trails. Then I showed the sidewalk connections. It was obvious you couldn’t get from one walking trail to another without getting in your car. They thought that was shocking.

Another issue was the coming, and still to be completed, southeastern portion of the bypass and noticing there were no sidewalks planned.

People started inquiring, including myself, and it was because we didn’t have a walk-bike plan.

The state, when they do new construction and are planning, they will look to see if you have a local plan and they will try to accommodate your local plan in the design of the new roadway.

If you don’t have a plan, they will do what’s most economical for the state. They decided not to do sidewalks along it. That was another shocking thing.

The way I really got involved was the creation of the walk-bike plan. Then my involvement became seeing those projects come to pass. It was acknowledging there was some need for improvements for walking and biking here.