Cities commonly offer tax breaks as one of their chief incentives to attract new businesses. Vallejo, Calif., while not abandoning tax incentives, has taken a different approach; one that capitalizes on available technology. The city of 120,000, located north of San Francisco, is offering an interactive, Internet/GIS marketing tool to existing as well as prospective businesses.

The tool is intended both to attract new businesses and to help existing businesses prosper. Property owners, brokers and leasing agents can post their listings on the Internet page and provide information such as lease or purchase price, square footage and proximity to major highways. Requests for such information are frequent, according to Anatalio Ubalde, an analyst with the city's Community Development Department. "Basically, what we're providing is free market analysis," Ubalde says. "This is made for the lay person. We made sure that it was very user-friendly."

In the past, city staff maintained a limited inventory of vacant commercial space and updated it biannually. If they found no match when someone called seeking information, staff members often spent hours calling real estate brokers to find acceptable properties, Ubalde says. Now, users or staff can search the database and access an updated inventory in real-time to identify appropriate sites, or they can quickly e-mail all brokers and leasing agents and describe a caller's desired building and site characteristics.

The site offers more than just the real estate lowdown. Detailed demographic information, including consumer buying patterns, population, racial composition, age breakdowns, housing characteristics and educational attainment, also is available.

Users can input a specific address and obtain demographic information for the surrounding area, from a diameter of a few blocks to up to 10 miles outside the city limits. Users also can get information on existing competitors. Eventually, data such as zoning designations and parcel information also will be available.

Vallejo officials put the application together in just six months, despite having no history of GIS use. "We've developed this application in a city that basically has no GIS infrastructure," Ubalde says. That was possible, he adds, because GIS data and maps, as well as demographic information, were readily available and affordable.

The city purchased demographic data from the "Survey of Buying Power," published by New York-based Market Statistics, and Dynamap/2000 GIS street maps from Geographic Data Technology, Lebanon, N.H. ArcView mapping software from ESRI, Redlands, Calif., also is being used. The city's Economic Development Division, GIS consultant Pablo Monzon of Berkeley, Calif.-based GIS Planning and the Vallejo real estate community played key roles in designing and implementing the system.

The Vallejo Web page (www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/ed.html) links to the GIS page, which was expected to be fully operational by the end of May. Viewing the site requires Netscape 3.0 or Internet Explorer 3.02 or a later version of either browser.