Building a Framework for a Spatial Decision Support System for Co-locating Public Facilities

Co-location involves the intentional siting together of public facilities. Co-locationof public facilities is becoming an increasingly common practice, particularly forits perceived benefits of resource savings, increased efficiency and synergy of services,and enhanced sense of community. Such advantages may be especially critical in alocation undergoing rapid growth. The ability to plan and manage the process of co-locatingpublic facilities can be very important to the successful, efficient growth of acommunity. However, there can be significant challenges. Deliberate planning can beproblematic in an environment of rapid growth. Co-location may instead be left toopportunity, which does little to maximize overall resource savings or to establish acoherent, long-term policy of co-location. Modeling can also be problematic in a rapidlychanging environment. In general, modeling has proven to be limited in terms of servingas a predictive siting tool for public facilities under real-world conditions. There are noone-size-fits-all models for siting facilities, let alone for co-locating them, which is a farmore complex endeavor. Thus, a more sustainable approach might be to develop adecision support tool. This research develops a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS)to co-locate public facilities in Loudoun County, a rapidly growing county in northernVirginia. The goal of the project is to determine if employing a SDSS based onCommunityViz in ArcGIS 9.2 facilitates successful co-location of public facilities in adynamic decision-making environment.