The Florida Enterprise Zones Program was established in 1994 following legislation that repealed the existing federal government's Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Community Zones and established a new application and designation process. The program operates at both the state and federal levels, providing incentives that accommodate both rural and urban areas.
Under the new application process, local governments are required to establish a strategic plan, form a local Enterprise Zone Development Agency, and submit a specific map showing the boundaries of the zone. The application process and zone activities are administered by the Governor's Office of Tourism, Trade, and Economic Development (OTTED), which also provides technical assistance and information.
This is an update of the ENTERPRISE_ZONES_MAY07 layer.
Although all of the local zones have the same basic goals of economic revitalization and community redevelopment, all of the zones are different. They offer their own local incentives and they maintain their own personal agendas for the communities. The local government contact provided in the attribute table serves as the primary point of contact for additional information about a particular zone.
This polygon representation of the Florida Enterprise Zones was created and maintained by staff of the Florida Brownfields Redevelopment Program. This data set represents a subset of the Florida Enterprise Zones based on the availability of paper maps, legal descriptions, or shapefiles providing the detailed boundaries of each zone. These sources were used to create a digital vector polygon of each zone as new information becomes available. This polygon information is combined with the zone contact information provided by the Office of Tourism, Trade, and Economic Development (OTTED) to provide the geospatial data presented in this layer.
Any Enterprise Zone not represented here may reflect a zone whose designation falls between the current update schedule such that the new zone has not yet been digitized or there is no map available to develop an accurate geospatial representation of that zone.
For a complete list of the Florida Enterprise Zones, visit the Enterprise Florida website at <http://www.floridaenterprisezones.com>.
A note about data scale:
Scale is an important factor in data usage. Certain scale datasets are not suitable for some project, analysis, or modeling purposes. Please be sure you are using the best available data.
1:24000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the county level. 1:24000 data should NOT be used for high accuracy base mapping such as property parcel boundaries. 1:100000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the multi-county or regional level. 1:125000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the regional or state level or larger.
Vector datasets with no defined scale or accuracy should be considered suspect. Make sure you are familiar with your data before using it for projects or analysis. Every effort has been made to supply the user with data documentation. For additional information, see the References section and the Data Source Contact section of this documentation. For more information regarding scale and accuracy, see our webpage at: <http://geoplan.ufl.edu/education.html>
Graphics and attributes of the original 25 Enterprise Zones current at the time of data development were created and visually verified by Camisha Clarke and Lindsay Horton.
Locational quality information was maintained throughout data development by recording the USERNAME, DATESTAMP, and SOURCE for each feature. See METHOD field to determine which process was used to develop each feature.
Finally, useful fields from the original list were joined to the polygons.
More information about Enterprise Zones and statewide incentives can be obtained from the Enterprise Florida website at <http://www.floridaenterprisezones.com>.
This update includes 54 of the 56 Florida Enterprise Zones and supplemental modifications to the metadata as submitted by C. Phoenix Clarke on 10/15/2007.
GeoPlan, during the QA/QC process included the following aspects: (1) Defined data to FGDL HPGN. (2) Added DESCRIPT item based on ZONE_NAME. (3) Added FGDLAQDATE based on GeoPlans acquisition date. (4) Attribute table upcased (5) AUTOID added to attribute table based on FID+1
Past versions of the Enterprise Zones dataset included information from both FDEP and HUD. The FDEP information contained state level enterprise zone information while the HUD information contained federal level enterprise zone information. Due to the different update cycles of these two sources the enterprise zone information will now be broken up into two datasets. The dataset enterprise_zones_mmmyy.shp will still contain the information obtained from FDEP while the dataset hud_rcezec.shp will contain the information obtained from HUD.
The dataset had two geoprocessing techniques applied to it, so that the older polygons could function more affectively in our SDE system, Integrate and Simplify Polygon Commands.
The Integrate command was run in order to better align abutting polygons while the Simplify Polygon command was run to removed extra unnecessary vertices.
Each command was run with a 1 meter correction tolerance in order to not negatively affect the polygons original shape.