Schuylkill County has launched a new, faster and more complete property map.

County Director of Planning and Graphic Information Systems Susan Smith unveiled the interactive map Wednesday. It replaces the Schuylkill Parcel Locator.Commissioners Chairman Frank J. Staudenmeier called the new map viewer a "serious upgrade."The overhaul, which began in November, cost $60,590, plus $300 a month for Amazon Cloud service.The map can be accessed at

http://gis.co.schuylkill.pa.us/mapviewer.The map viewer offers access to parcel, assessment, zoning and other information in a user-friendly format.The new map viewer allows people to more easily search by address, offers several print options, is more easily navigated and features a data pop-up display. It can be linked to Google Street View. deed information is updated overnight, and the map itself refreshed every weekend.It includes more up-to-date aerial imagery, FEMA flood hazard information, the National Wetlands Inventory and mineral maps.Unseen to users, the new program uses Amazon Cloud for storage, said Bruce E. Stauffer, vice president of GeographIT, the Lancaster company that redesigned the parcel locator to be compatible with newer software.The old parcel locator was created in 2003, Smith said. The company that created it in 2009, ESRI, stopped supporting the software because it was so out of date.The cost of the project breaks down to $38,450 for the contract with GeographIT for the map viewer; $13,910 for GeographIT to redesign the system; $7,030 for the new GIS data server; and a one-time startup fee of $1,200 for the Amazon Cloud service. The service cost about $300 a month to maintain, depending on user demand, Smith said.She said the system, data server and Cloud service are not just for the map viewer, but rather for the county's GIS server needs."We needed to address the GIS server architecture design when considering software upgrades. The GIS system is much larger and bears more responsibility than the map viewer," she said.