MGISAC Meeting Minutes
September 10, 2026
Attendees
Ex-Officio Members
MSDIS – Thomas Vought – p
OA-ITSD – David Nykodym – p
NSGIC Liaison – Katilin Hughes – pp
USGS – Cyndi Rachol – p

State Members
MDA – Jacque Walters – p
DNR – Zackary Becker – p
MDC – Tim Bixler – p
MOARNG – Kaleb Bauer – p
MoDOT – Josh Carey – p
SEMA – Lucious Creamer – p

Cooperating Agencies
Boone County – Matt Smith – p
City of Columbia – John Townsend – p
City of Jefferson – Buster Schrage – p
Cole County – Melissa Johnson – p
Mid-MO RPC – Jennifer Bowden – p
MO 911 Board – Shawn Penman – p
MU Extension/CARES – Chris Barnett – p
Northwest Missouri State – Jesse Lane – p
Sanborn – Brad Arshat – p
SEMO RPC – Sarah Brown – p
Southeast MO State – Indi Braden – p
Bowman – Jack King – p
GISCI – Tony Spicci – p
USDA-NRCS – Katie Philbrick – p
Washington University – Mollie Webb – pp
Wilson & Co – Derek Wilson – p
Bartlett & West – James Rakestraw – p

Other Attendees
Wiley Howell
KHeady
Curtis-FLW
Franklin County GIS – Rochelle and Drake
Joe Eckmann
Tess Szatkowski
Dan Rose
Michael Sunde
Rick Staudinger
Daniel W
Dustin Goodwin
MAGIC

Call to Order – 10:02am

Approval of Meeting Minutes – No changes were sent for last meetings minutes. Minutes were approved as-is.

Administration

OGI – David’s last meeting with the State. David’s position, a Developer and specialist position have all been posted today. Still a bit on hiring freeze but those positions are available. Might be closing the specialist position soon as they have started interviews, but David’s and the developer position just opened today.

MSDIS Report – August/September

Congressional Districts just ruled against again. Both versions are available on MSDIS until we hear further orders from this.

Tom and Katilin have been elected to MAGIC steering committee. Tom also asked to participate on the imagery theme.

New Data
• MSDIS is pleased to report that it has received NG911 data from Barry County. The
geodatabase delivered includes address points, road centerlines, and the PSAP boundary. MSDIS staff are currently working on writing appropriate metadata. These data will be distributed via the MSDIS Open Data Hub thanks to an MOU recently signed between Barry County and the University of Missouri. MSDIS staff are reaching out to other Missouri counties to gauge interest in sharing their own NG911 data with the clearinghouse.

Updated Data
• MSDIS did not receive any data updates during this reporting period.

MSDIS General News
Anticipated Funding Shortfall Bad news first… several state agencies are already aware by now, but the expansion funding from the Office of Geospatial Information has hit a snag. OA will likely not be able to provide a sizeable chunk of the previously agreed funding for the clearinghouse and, as a result, has taken to petitioning several state agencies for support. I am treating this like a budget cut no different than what everyone else is facing. Between what we expect to receive from OA and our existing reserves, MSDIS currently has enough funding to continue current operations through FY27 and, at present, there is no reason to believe that funding for MSDIS will be cut entirely. We are actively engaging with some of our private sector partners who may have the ear of the Governor’s Office to advocate on our behalf and, now that Senate Bill 959 has passed, we trust that we can count on the Advisory Council to push to restore the misplaced funds. For a more complete assessment, please see Appendix I

MSDIS Web Presence
The new MSDIS WordPress site is live, but we are still working to refine the tablet and mobile browsing.

ESRI Health and Governance Review
One of the only major purchases made with our FY26 expansion funding was an ESRI Health and Governance review of MSDIS architecture. I’m pleased to finally be able to announce that we have taken the first steps to start collecting the data necessary to inform a three-day site visit from ESRI to help us better understand how MSDIS’ data architecture can be improved. This consultation will also include the creation of a comprehensive playbook for how to run MSDIS more effectively. This agreement has already paid dividends. The installation of ArcGIS Monitor has been a key component in helping recover from the 15 August server outage. Also, it’s just fun to watch the data roll in. I can tell when you guys all show up to work in the mornings, when you go to lunch, if it’s a state holiday that I forgot about… It’s just super neat.

August Presentations – MITAC and SLAC
On 26 August, Tom attended the Missouri Information Technology Advisory Council (MITAC) to
introduce MSDIS to Missouri’s assembled IT coordinators. This was an excellent opportunity to discuss the role the clearinghouse plays in Missouri’s overarching information and data infrastructure. The attendees asked several excellent questions about the data distributed by MSDIS and its relationship with that state, local, and private sectors. AT THE EXACT SAME TIME… Katilin was introducing MSDIS to the final quarterly meeting of the USGIF St Louis Area Community of Interest (SLAC). The invitation to speak at this event was a direct result of the MSDIS field trip to St Louis in early August.

New Semester, New Team
You guys should know this routine by now. With a new academic semester comes a new team of MSDIS student employees. The Fall 2026 MSDIS Team will include Rikki Ascani as a Graduate Student Intern, Casey Hagedorn and Kaitlyn Laurentius as Undergraduate Interns, and Andrew Hantak as an Independent Study Student. We say goodbye to Addison Vallier, who will be focusing on other opportunities.

State Training
State training workshops continue, but the important news this month is that Continuing Education Units for the Introduction to ArcGIS Pro workshop are being approved. This means that everyone who completed one of our ArcGIS Pro workshops will receive documentation that they have earned a small number of credits for Continuing Education requirements.

MSDIS Downtime
The Statewide Imagery Server suffered a significant disruption on the afternoon of 25 August 2026 that could not be resolved by restarting the virtual machine. On investigation, it was revealed that a single IP Address was overwhelming the server with exportImage requests. This IP Address was blocked via both IIS Manager and the University of Missouri firewall, which immediately resulted in the server returning to normal operations. Additional adjustments have been made via IIS Manager to fortify the server against similar situations, and I continue closely monitoring the traffic levels. For a more complete assessment, please see Appendix II

MSDIS Traffic
This section remains pending.

Donate To MSDIS
Anyone wishing to directly support MSDIS can still donate to the MSDIS Excellence Fund.
MSDIS would like to thank both Aaron Addison and Arthur Crawford for their generous donations to the fund.

MSDIS Socials Media
Your Friendly Neighborhood GIS Data Clearinghouse is proud to announce its triumphant return to the world of social media. You can now follow MSDIS on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Appendix I – MSDIS Budget Shortfall
In this year’s state budget, the legislature unilaterally decided to change the MSDIS expansion funding model from being sourced entirely by General Revenue to being evenly split between General Revenue, the Conservation Commission Fund, and the State Highways and Transportation Department Fund (which, contrary to the intention of whoever made this change, is not in any way related to MoDOT).The timeline is a little hazy and, to the best of my knowledge, the individual (or individuals) responsible for the change remain unknown. What I can tell you is that in the Governor’s Recommended Budget, the MSDIS funding was split into a 66/16/16 split between General Revenue, the Conservation Fund, and the Transportation Fund. That change was exacerbated by the legislature, which made it an even 33/33/33 split. I attempted to raise concerns about this issue with several individuals but was repeatedly advised to let the situation play out.

The result is that two agencies (including one that has probably never even heard of MSDIS) somehow got put on the hook for financially supporting MSDIS. Obviously, that’s not an ideal situation. ITSD is currently engaging several other state agencies to gauge their ability to contribute funds on top of the 33% from General Revenue, but I am deeply skeptical that this strategy will generate any additional funding. This situation wasn’t well understood by anyone until after everything had been signed into law, most of the agencies being contacted now had no prior knowledge of the change, and none of them planned for being asked to throw money at an agreement they had no part in writing. People are justifiably frustrated with suddenly being asked to fund something they hadn’t previously budgeted for. Getting upset at each other isn’t going to help, though, and I would remind everyone that nobody involved in these discussions is responsible for the need for these discussions. I am happy to schedule a meeting to discuss the situation in more detail and plan how the Council can make a case to the legislature and the Governor for why the funding should be restored or, at a minimum, stabilized.

Fortunately, the Mizzou fiscal office assures me that MSDIS has enough surplus funding from last year to cover FY27 while we work with ITSD, OGI, and others to figure out how best to move forward into FY28. Furthermore, while this funding change was enacted without advice from anyone actually affected by the new model, it is worth pointing out that both the Governor and the legislature specifically included MSDIS funding in the state budget and included at the previously agreed-to level, so there is every reason to believe that all entities WANT a funded clearinghouse, they just need to figure out a sustainable way to make that happen.

Appendix II – 25 August Server Outage
After experiencing higher than usual traffic for several days, the MSDIS State Imagery Server suffered a significant failure at approximately 1:30 PM on 25 August 2026. Once it was clear that restarting the server was not resolving the problem and that there was nothing obviously wrong with the network, storage, or virtual machine, I opened a help ticket with ESRI. The ESRI support desk could also not isolate a problem and requested copies of MSDIS log files to review.

During the morning of 26 August 2026, I resumed troubleshooting the problem myself, along with the aid of Copilot. After several attempts at diagnosing the problem, Copilot came to the same conclusion both I and the Mizzou Division of IT had, that the server was being overwhelmed with incoming requests. Using Copilot to rapidly review the last 48 hours of server logs, we were able to identify a single IP Address responsible for the flood of additional traffic. That IP Address was banned at the IIS level (and at the University of Missouri firewall) and performance immediately began returning to normal. I have been keeping a close eye on traffic levels since restoring the server to functionality and there have been no additional extended periods of significant traffic.

Council may need to do a letter of support for MSDIS. Need to identify the importance and value of MSDIS to keep it funded. When a clearinghouse takes cuts it ends up becoming a lack of support for GIS. We need to get the ROI on MSDIS. Possibly put together a type of GMA assessment to get some info from users. Needs to be more than just ROI for state users, but also how the data is helping users across state in other arenas.

Treasurer’s Report – $300 for logo design fee for conference. $20,571.88 balance. SEMO expenses coming up later this month.

Membership Report – No changes. 35m, 0v, 18q. Once legislation kicks in then there will be some changes. Memberships will become an appointed citizen for those that are outside of the stated organizations. This would mean if someone leaves their organization then that organization will lose their spot and they will have to have someone new appointed. Question if the 14 citizens have to meet a certain criteria or if they really are just citizens with GIS knowledge? Believed that it could be all of the above. Someone retired from an avenue could potentially fill a role.

Committee Reports

Communications, Marketing, Outreach – Next meeting is in KC at Anita B. Gorman Conservation Center. Sign up on MGISAC.org website so that they know how many are coming for food. There’s also a signup to do a presentation. Looking for some input on if some of the options are good choices. Char Bar BBQ, McLains Bakery, Our House KC. Char Bar is very good apparently. Upcoming Coordinates of Chaos meeting on September 18th at 11am. Another September 28th at 2pm. If you watch the first one then you’ll be in a better place for questions at the one on the 28th.

Data Development – Met last week and kicked around ideas for data collection and ways to get it to MSDIS. Also talked imagery. Shooting for 2029 to get at least 1/3rd of the state to get money together. Splitting state into thirds on the dashboard. Going to start reaching out to local governments. Trying to figure out what they want to accomplish. Looking at what Barry county did and figuring out how to reproduce that.

NG911 – Sent out Save the Date yesterday for 911 user group meeting at the end of the month. Take the survey so they know what topics people are interested in. Working to start getting people to validate their boundaries with their neighbors so there aren’t any response overlap. Question about state border counties if they are working to sort out response overlap with their out of state neighbors. There are efforts being made across our borders.

Education – Tara at GeoResolution Conference today. Story map has been updated. Lindenwood GIS Day registration link is live. SEMO GIS has their gathering September 30th. Educator workshop at UMSL on September 18. Tara will be teaching along with Professor Gizelle Cota. Shout out to Tony Spicci for his AI in GIS education video that he made with Joseph Kerski. It is linked on the outreach story map. Fort Leonard Wood is also sponsoring a GIS Day event.

Legislation – Some national level stuff to watch. 21st Century Road to Housing Act was passed in March that has a report requirement to create an appraisal database. Potential for parcel data layer in that. Still waiting on the Flair Act that passed in 2022. Federal Land Asset Inventory It was supposed to map federal assets but it hasn’t been implemented.

Conference – Website and facebook updated with logo. Sponsorship information is on the site. Prices for registration will be up soon. Currently working on getting the registration site put together with MU. Expected to open registration sometime the first part of October. We are looking to get a keynote locked in. If anyone knows someone who has good timely topics or a GIS person local to St. Louis we would love some ideas of who to talk to. Have also begun looking for venues for the social.

Liaison Reports

NSGIC – NR

MAGIC – MAGIC is a 10 state regional consortium. They adopted Minnesota this year. The clearinghouses is a big initiative for them. Free to be a member. Sign up for mailing list. Participation at MAGIC is largely for the 2028 Symposium coming up. Also doing budget work currently. magicgis.org

Agency Reports

USGS – JFA has been signed for East Central Hydrography project. New project area is northeast. NV5 was the selected vendor. Haven’t had kickoff meeting yet but will get our timeline at that meeting. Pennsylvania is putting on a workshop for hydrography. NGS Beta products page in prep for the official launch of the SPCS2022.

NRCS – 11 counties around St. Louis area are funded so Tim should shift money to Central MO. Katilin came over yesterday and had a discussion on how to handle Lidar. This year there’s money but going to get thin next year. NRCS likely will only be able to do 10 counties a year going forward.

 

Open Discussion

In KC next month at 11am. Question about if we want to get together before or after. Breakfast, dinner the night before, social after the presentations. Let Zack know your thoughts.

Transition update has been working through by laws. Been having several sub-committee meetings. No final document yet. Still some feedback that hasn’t been put in yet but a draft is together. Some changes are possible such as going to bi-monthly meetings. Possibly asking to report GIS usage in your agency a couple times a year. Thinking through some of our other roles such as treasurer that’s not technically required and voted on but still useful. Likely going to be an appointed role. It hasn’t gone out to the Listserv so if you would like to look through it reach out to Zack. No timeline on transition yet. Someone from OA has been calling around asking about appointed representatives but this has been slowed while we work on our by-laws and need to make sure that the right people are in on the conversations.

Adjourned – 11:34am