Converting lat/long distance to miles.

[Camden Daily]

Ah, I seem to have it now.  Instead of reprojectiong the point and
layer before my querybypoint calls, I reproject the point and the
individual shapes before I do my distancetoshape calls.  I don't
exactly understand why the previous method didn't work, but I got it
now.

Here's the working function I'm using to find the closest shape to a
point and the distance in meters, as opposed to latlong:

function get_closest($layer, $point) {
  global $map;

  $layer = $map->getLayerByName($layer);
  $layer->set("toleranceunits", MS_MILES);

  // loop through, increasing the tolerance each time until we find some matches
  $tolerance = 1;
  $found_flag = false;
  while (!$found_flag AND ($tolerance < 30)) {
    $layer->set("tolerance", $tolerance);
    $layer->queryByPoint($point, MS_MULTIPLE, -1);
    $num_results = $layer->getNumResults();
    if ($num_results > 0) {
      $found_flag = true; }
    else {
      $tolerance += 1; }
  }

  if ($num_results == 0) {
    return array(-1); }
  else {
    // clone the point
    $temp_point = ms_newPointObj();
    $temp_point->setXY($point->x, $point->y);

    // project cloned point to NAD83 / Illinois East so that our
calculated distance are in meters, not dd
    $temp_point->project(ms_newprojectionobj("init=epsg:4326"),
ms_newprojectionobj("init=epsg:26971"));

    // set our min_distance to a very large value
    $min_distance = 999999999999;

    // loop through our results and see which on is closest
    $layer->open();
    for ($i=0; $i < $num_results; $i++) {
      $result = $layer->getResult($i);
      $shape = $layer->getShape($result->tileindex, $result->shapeindex);
      // reproject our shape to the same projection as our cloned point
      $shape->project(ms_newprojectionobj("init=epsg:4326"),
ms_newprojectionobj("init=epsg:26971"));
      $distance = $temp_point->distanceToShape($shape);
      if ($distance < $min_distance) {
        $min_distance = $distance;
        $closest = $shape; }
    }
    $layer->close();
    return array($min_distance, $closest);
  }
}

Thanks again for the help everyone!