TxGIO, DIR StratMap Contracts: Strategic Asset for Texas Communities
3/23/26 – The Texas Water Development Board recently issued a press release about the State’s Geographic Information Office (TxGIO) and Department of Information Resources (DIR) contracts. The concepts discussed in the article affect many growing areas in the San Jacinto watershed, which is plagued by political fragmentation.
Dozens of counties, cities, and utility districts share responsibility for development, drainage, and flood-control. But they update their flood maps infrequently and irregularly. So, engineers and hydrologists often have trouble planning. They have a fragmented, incomplete picture of what’s going on around them.
But these state systems help to change that. Two key takeaways:
- They pre-qualify a pool of vendors. That shortens the qualification and bidding processes for services they may need, such as LIDAR.
- Upon completion, studies become part of the public domain – available to everyone who can benefit from them.
The press release, reprinted below, talks about many synergies already discovered with these ingenious systems. They increase collaboration, speed, and cost sharing to improve planning and reduce flood risk.
From TWDB’s Texas Water Newsroom
Imagine two neighboring communities facing the same challenge.
A small watershed authority in East Texas needs high-resolution elevation data. Recent storms have rewritten floodplain maps, and the old topography simply doesn’t match what residents now experience during heavy rains. Engineers need accurate models. Emergency managers need better evacuation planning. The watershed authority has the expertise to specify the data but lacks the budget to acquire it.
Forty miles away, a county engineering department faces the same problem. New development pressures require updated drainage studies. The county’s flood maps show their age. Engineers spend hours adjusting for known errors rather than designing solutions. They have budget allocated but procurement rules demand a competitive bidding process that will take a year or more to complete.
Both entities will acquire elevation data eventually, but they’ll pay different prices and receive deliverables that may not align at their shared boundaries. This fragmentation describes how Texas communities acquired geospatial data for decades—a siloed process that was slow and inefficient, with few opportunities for collaboration. The old way treated every project as a fresh start rather than a contribution to shared infrastructure.
StratMap Contracts
The Texas Geographic Information Office (TxGIO) and the Department of Information Resources (DIR) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) & Digital Land Surveying Products and Services contracts—known collectively as the StratMap contracts—were developed to be a far more streamlined procurement model.
The StratMap program was originally established in 1997 by Senate Bill 1 to develop consistent statewide digital data layers. Since then, its primary goal has been to acquire and improve digital geographic data for statewide mapping applications, and the program also maintains comprehensive data standard specifications to ensure consistent, high-quality data products across Texas. The TxGIO StratMap program administers and promotes the StratMap contracts, and TxGIO uses those contracts to get the data it needs to develop and maintain consistent statewide digital data layers.
For hydrologists modeling flood risks, engineers designing infrastructure, GIS professionals building applications, and citizens depending on sound governance, the StratMap contracts deliver what communities need most: quality geospatial services, software, and hardware at competitive prices.
How StratMap contracts work
The genius of the StratMap Contracts lies in their simplicity—generally, the state negotiates GIS contracts every five years so that individual communities and governmental entities don’t have to do it themselves. Before signing any potential StratMap vendor contracts, a team of GIS technical experts from TxGIO and DIR contract specialists evaluate every company seeking a StratMap contract based upon their project experience, technology innovation, professional staff, and available resources.
Companies that pass this review earn a place on the DIR Master Contracts list as qualified providers. These pre-approved providers serve Texas state, regional, and local government offices, including river and water authorities, and public education entities. Each approved vendor maintains a Pricing Index on their DIR contract page that lists available products, services, and software alongside pre-negotiated percentage discounts.
The three-step procurement process
Once a community identifies a need, the typical path forward contains three steps:
- Review the Pricing Index on the vendor’s DIR contract page to confirm available offerings and discounts.
- Obtain a quote directly from the vendor’s listed contact. The quote must reflect the contract’s pre-negotiated discount percentage. If the project is for a state agency and is over $50,000 or requires customization, the community provides a statement of work with the quote and must go through the DIR statement of work process for review and approval—which can take a couple of months.
- Issue a purchase order listing the company’s DIR contract number.
That’s it. No months spent drafting and reviewing contracts. The master contracts already satisfy procurement requirements and enable entities to quickly obtain competitive bids from multiple pre-qualified vendors in one place. For state agencies, additional thresholds govern statement of work requirements and processes. But for most local governments, these three steps represent all the administrative requirements.
Complete geospatial coverage
StratMap Contracts cover the full spectrum of GIS:
- Hardware: GPS units, handheld lidar units, survey equipment
- Data acquisition: Aerial photography, lidar, elevation modeling, planimetric mapping, bathymetry
- Services/Data products: Project management, quality assurance, technical consulting, GIS cloud services
- Software: GIS platforms, specialized analysis tools, enterprise solutions
Whether a community needs new data, help managing a project, or software to analyze existing information, the contracts provide access to quality vendors who can provide what they need. This streamlined procurement process alone is a huge benefit, but incredible strategic value emerges when communities start collaborating.
TxGIO is a collaboration facilitator
No single city or county sees the full map of geospatial activity across Texas, but TxGIO does. Through quarterly community meetings, TxGIO maintains visibility into which projects are being planned, where overlap may exist, and potential partnerships. When a community notifies TxGIO about a potential project, they don’t simply file the information. TxGIO scans for matches and considers who else might need the data to uncover opportunities that isolated communities may not find on their own. This approach allows communities to discover shared challenges and data requirements and combine their budgets to expand the scope of projects and meet their needs more effectively.
Cost sharing as standard practice
StratMap actively cultivates collaboration. Communities that use StratMap learn to start every project conversation with a simple question: “Who else might need this?”
Sometimes the answer reveals unexpected partners. A city planning some new parks might connect with a county assessing conservation easements. A groundwater district modeling aquifers might align with a utility mapping critical infrastructure. A school district planning new facilities might coordinate with emergency services designing evacuation routes. Each partnership multiplies the value of every dollar spent and builds relationships that endure beyond individual projects. Collaboration normalizes the idea that geospatial data serves regional needs.
The specification dividend
Partnerships under StratMap deliver another hidden benefit: better specifications.
When multiple entities collaborate on a statement of work, each brings distinct requirements to the table. The watershed authority prioritizes vertical accuracy for flood modeling. The county emphasizes land cover classification for drainage analysis. A participating city cares about planimetric features for infrastructure management.
Vendors receive requirements that reflect diverse, real-world needs rather than a single department’s perspective. The resulting data serves more purposes, satisfies more stakeholders, and delivers greater return on investment. TxGIO staff facilitate these conversations, helping partners balance competing priorities and arrive at specifications that work for everyone. Their experience across dozens of projects informs recommendations that communities couldn’t develop independently. This collaboration pays in immediate cost savings, in better data, and in regional relationships that strengthen Texas communities for years to come.
The compounding value of data in the public domain
For TxGIO StratMap projects, after vendors deliver final products and independent quality assurance confirms their accuracy, the data enters the public domain. TxGIO staff verify deliverables, integrate them into statewide collections, and make them available to everyone.
Traditional procurement treats data as a consumable. A community pays for it, uses it, and eventually replaces it, so its value degrades over time. The StratMap program inverts this model. TxGIO projects add to a growing public repository. Each new dataset increases the repository’s utility, and new users discover applications for that data that the original sponsors never imagined.
And because TxGIO maintains all StratMap deliverables, staff understand what works and what doesn’t. They have worked with more than 80 different agencies in Texas, from river authorities to municipalities, counties, and councils of government. So, TxGIO sees which specifications produce reliable results. They track which vendors consistently deliver quality and can identify emerging technologies that improve accuracy or reduce costs.
This experience informs future statements of work. When the next community plans a project, TxGIO staff recommend specifications refined through dozens of previous efforts. They warn against approaches that failed elsewhere and can suggest others that succeeded. Each project learns from every project that came before, which ensures that every Texas community, regardless of size or budget, can build on the best available information.
StratMap prepares Texas communities for the future
Texas faces challenges in the coming decades, from population growth to flood risks that will require sophisticated modeling and environmental needs that will demand informed management. Communities need accurate geospatial information to navigate these challenges effectively.
The StratMap contracts can help provide the foundational data upon which solutions to those challenges depend.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 3/23/26
3128 Days since Hurricane Harvey
