When Jim Petro initially pitched his company’s new technology product, enabling municipal governments to more easily map and monitor their underground utility infrastructure, officials in St. Charles weren’t biting.

But then he got a phone call from St. Charles’ mayor.

“Can you show up at our city council meeting?” the mayor asked him. “We had a water main hit and we   didn’t even know it existed.”

That lucky break three years ago opened the door for NewCom Technologies Inc., which now counts that Madison County community among 21 municipal clients it serves throughout the state. Using geographic information system, or GIS, technology, NewCom’s suite of software, called SeeCity, enables city officials to instantly access data from numerous types of property records that previously were stored on paper.

Now the company is seeking $750,000 in venture capital to help launch a next-generation product that will allow officials such as building inspectors and utilities workers to update property data while in the field. The company’s five-year plan calls for a spinoff company that will employ 24 people at the end of its fifth year to develop and market both SeeCity and its new mobile product, SeeCity Voyager.

In February NewCom received a $14,500 Entrepreneurial Venture Award grant from the Iowa Department of Economic Development, and last month presented its business plan to potential investors through the Iowa Venture Network.

The product represents a new growth opportunity for the 12-year-old Des Moines company, whose primary business has been telecommunications engineering for major cable television operators throughout North America and, more recently, Japan.

NewCom became a wholly owned subsidiary of McLeodUSA Inc. in 1998, but Petro bought the company back in 2001 after the telecom bubble burst. The company’s work force, which had peaked at 106 workers, shrank to 38. Today, NewCom averages a work force of 10 employees.

The company’s experience in using GIS began with in-house efforts to speed up its production and become more efficient, Petro said. From there, NewCom began searching for new market opportunities in the face of a slumping telecommunications industry.

“We were doing some work for Mediacom [Communications Corp.], and we needed some city records that showed where their underground facilities were,” he said. “We recognized through our experience that many cities have very little record management in digital form, and sometimes the records were incomplete.”

One way the software can be used is to help some city governments comply with their ordinances requiring notification of nearby residents when new building permits are filed.

Instead of searching through the county property records, “with our solution, you simply click on the parcel, a form pops up, it does a little search and generates a list from county parcel data, and automatically generates a boilerplate letter,” Petro said. “Those kinds of applications are extremely well received, and it seems like every community we’ve gone into, they have another ‘can-you-do’ for us.”

Among NewCom’s Central Iowa clients are the cities of Carlisle, Clive, Waukee and West Des Moines.

The city of Waukee has used the system since late 2004, and working with NewCom has been a “great experience,” said Jody Gunderson, Waukee’s director of community development. Waukee spent approximately $31,000 for the system, which included a significant amount of consulting work, he said.

“They’ve really taken a look at each department and determined what we were really wanting,” Gunderson said. “You can go to a particular parcel in the city, and any data (detailing city infrastructure) can be pulled up as part of a PDF document. That’s just really invaluable; I don’t have to go run around for the information; I know where to find it.”

Additionally, Waukee’s system has been set up to automatically notify city officials when updates are available from the county on its parcel data, Gunderson said. “There’s a lot of comfort in knowing the information we’re using is the most up-to-date available from the county,” he said.

NewCom’s concept for making the technology mobile began with a concept it proposed to Waukee officials for use in sidewalk surveys. Using a tablet PC that interfaces with a digital camera, a city inspector can record code violations by snapping photos and filling in pop-up forms while on the scene, and then download the data at the end of the day into the system to generate printed notices to residents.

The city of Ottumwa became NewCom’s first Voyager client, ordering the system to conduct inspections of its storm water system. Waukee has since ordered two of the systems, which cost about $18,000 each, to use for storm water inspections, as well as for building permit inspections and for code compliance inspections such as sidewalk surveys, Petro said.

To build its next generation of Voyager, NewCom is working with Emerging Growth Group, a Des Moines-based business incubator, to conduct focus-group meetings to outline a comprehensive list of requirements from potential client cities, he said.

“I’m really excited about where we’re headed with this,” Petro said. “I get my high from just talking to our users and hearing how they’re benefiting from it.”