Throw a dart at a map of Tennessee. You will probably hit somewhere that is growing. Nashville’s outskirts are projected to add a quarter to their population in the next 15 years. The Ford Motor Company has begun construction on the BlueOval City manufacturing plant outside of Memphis. A multibillion-dollar uranium enrichment facility has broken ground in the Knoxville exurbs.

Tennessee growing at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. does not surprise anyone who issues residential building permits in the state. Inspectors at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) saw requests for subsurface sewage disposal system services jump 18% in one year. “It’s a monumental, staggering rate to grow,” said Steve Owens, the TDEC environmental consultant tasked with expediting service delivery across the state.

Owens, a meteorologist by training, hydrologist by virtue, and self-taught geographic information system (GIS) engineer by practice, streamlined the work of TDEC inspectors with enterprise GIS technology. With it, a team of fewer than 100 inspectors processed over 23,000 requests last year in Tennessee’s rural fringe communities.

Designing a System Around How Inspectors Work

About one in five Americans lives in a home that relies on a septic system. They are built in remote areas too far to connect to municipal sewage systems, which happen to be the places where Tennessee is growing the fastest. High demand for housing created a sense of urgency to issue permits as swiftly — and as safely — as possible.

Owens spent his early career in a truck as a septic permit inspector. “It’s hard work,” he said from his Memphis office. “You’re dealing with outdoor conditions all day and you’re never working fast enough.”

Inspectors often eat lunch in their trucks while driving to their next site. The septic systems that they design, permit and inspect treat wastewater from homes and businesses. These systems must be well suited to the specific soil conditions of the land to work properly. When evaluating proposed subdivisions, inspectors conduct a range of fieldwork assessments — such as soil profiles, percolation data, and absorption rates — all while answering calls from the public.

A malfunctioning or ill-fitted septic system can pollute wells of drinking water and springs. Foul-smelling sewage can pool on the surface, creating a breeding ground for parasites, mosquitoes and other vectors that can spread pathogens to neighbors and pets.

A June 2024 TDEC audit of drip dispersal systems documented more than 400 site visits in a short time frame. Inspectors used an ArcGIS enterprise program to compare standard observations and record site-specific notes and photographs at each site. Results are filtered and displayed on an interactive map.

The audit represents a fraction of the work that TDEC permit inspectors do. Complaint investigations, repair designs, and expansion assessments are among the 13 different types of services inspectors deliver each day. To modernize, Owens configured an enterprise GIS to manage the full scope of operational data for those services—from how residents make requests, to how inspectors execute the work and get documentation to the customer, to how management reports progress.

“It’s different from the typical mapping and analysis you might associate with GIS,” Owens said. “We’re utilizing ArcGIS Survey123 and ArcGIS Dashboards to create an efficient ecosystem for what we do with our work and how to get that work out to the public.”

A “Flintstones to Jetsons” Digital Transformation

As recently as seven years ago, Tennessee septic permit data existed entirely on paper. Pulling a permit meant driving to a state office in the county seat and making photocopies. Digitization came with an announcement from the governor that made headlines across the state. Trucks hauled away filing cabinets full of septic records, and technicians scanned their contents to create a FileNet public document system of record. “We have gone from Flintstones to Jetsons in the last decade,” Owens said.

In the past, permit requests came to TDEC inspectors as a list of addresses and contact information. Inspectors started each day punching addresses into online mapping sites, guessing at an efficient route. Their days ended back at the office to log their time, update templates, and input data into various spreadsheets.

In high-growth counties, where multiple inspectors collaborate to tackle a significant workload, they often duplicated efforts. “It would not be uncommon for someone to go out to a site on Wednesday, and the next guy would go out there on Friday and not know the work had…