Tempe Responds to GIS Data Request
December 1, 2009 53 Comments
I got a response back from the City of Tempe.
Hello Mr. Fee,
Here’s some information that I hope assists with your specific request and also clarifies the city’s policy and state law with regard to production of this information. Tempe’s policy is guided by state law (available at this link) which allows for the purpose of a commercial request to be asked.
Non-commercial
You mentioned that your request is for a presentation to a Tempe elementary school, which sounds non-commercial. Please contact Wendy Springborn in our Engineering Division (480-350-8250) in order to discuss exactly what you’d like to request. The city does not charge for non-commercial requests, except for the production of CDs to deliver the records. Some records might be deliverable via an emailed PDF, but that depends on whether the requester wants to be able to manipulate the record. If they do, that cannot be delivered via PDF because of the limitations of that format. Wendy is ready to assist with your request if you’ll let her know what you need.
Commercial
Tempe bases its commercial rates in part on a fair approximation of market value. As described in the state law above, municipalities and other entities are able to ask the purpose of commercial requests and to deny improper requests upon the approval of the governor. The statute also establishes the ability to seek damages if records obtained for a non-commercial purpose are then used for a commercial purpose. You noted a few cities’ elected representatives have chosen to make all of this information searchable online; that would be a policy decision rather than staff action. It seems that some of your concerns with the city’s GIS records policy are grounded in the state law requirements rather than independent city policies.
Tempe places a high priority on transparency and customer service. We make every effort to fulfill records requests of all types across the many city functions and departments. Please let me know if I can assist in answering any other questions.
Regards,
Nikki Ripley City of Tempe Communication and Media Relations Director
So there you go, at least they are going to let you have it for personal use. Good, at a minimum that is good news. I’ll be making my request ASAP. The part that causes me to pause is this, “Tempe bases its commercial rates in part on a fair approximation of market value”. I couldn’t disagree more with this statement and it is nuts that they think that this data is worth $100,000. Nothing in the state law says Tempe should charge $100,000 for their data. Fair market value for public data shouldn’t be 6 figures. This is why people don’t go to the source to get data but third party providers who don’t have the accuracy of Tempe’s data. I’m disappointed in this response so it shows how much more work we have with local governments.
Update: I submitted a public records request, so we’ll see how this goes.
About James Fee
So what happens if you’re non-commercial data then gets used commercially? Are they set up like the big vendors to go after those using the data commercially? (Not suggesting you find out.)
James, I hope you post the license agreement they have you sign when you receive your non-commercial version of the public data.
Wow, what a weird response. You should get the data and just post it.
@John Reiser
I’ll be happy to post the license agreement I sign if they will give me the data that I want.
@Lefty
No that isn’t going to happen. I want to get the ability to share the data with everyone under no license legally. My reasons to get the data in the first place is for GIS Day type events to local elementary school kids.
OK, I stayed out of the last one, but I can be quiet no more.
This is simply amazing, pricing data this way. I can’t imagine a reason for it other than as some have said, a road block to actually using it.
While I am not from Arizona, I always thought of Tempe as progressive. Clearly they are among the worst offenders of public data I’ve yet seen. We aren’t perfect at my city, but we do sell our data a a reasonable level. $500 for everything and I think in the next year we’ll be giving it away.
Best of luck James, you apparently need it.
A call to hold State of the Map 2010 in Tempe, AZ!
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_2010
Hey, stop bashing local governments, we’re the laboratories of democracy!
Here in Canada, we have open data in places like Vancouver and Toronto (ahem, among others) but we also have places like Winnipeg that is charging $230,000 for its GIS data.
I’d argue that open data has a long way to go, but it’s not only at the local government level. The BC Provincial government still has many non-open datasets (including an incredibly over-priced and aging resource inventory dataset), as does the Canadian Federal government. I’d imagine there is a similar landscape across your State governments if not at the Federal level.
Hey Jason, don’t forget the DNV!
We still charge a nominal fee for a handful of datasets – some may say the only really useful ones – but we’re swimming upstream trying to change the mentality of our Municipality from “GIS can make us money” to “GIS can save us money”.
Would you believe I hadn’t seen your awesome revamped website before today? Nice job, and lots of data.
From my perspective, even if businesses aren’t contributing direct revenue to the muni, the data is making it easier for them to either do business in your municipality, allow others to do business in your municipality, or provide some value to your residents or visitors.
If you are making the data available for free, their value-add had better be incredibly unique or eventually it will also be made available to local businesses or residents for minimal or even negative costs.
State law “allows” and “requires” are quite different. These are our times. It is up to the GIS Community to establish best practices. In the last post “it will cost – ya”, the discussion highlighted the key aspects of what makes the GIS so strong as well as so weak. We are a varied community that is largely ungoverned. We each bring our own experience and ideals to the discussion.
I think that there is also a downside to that characteristic though. Again, as evident by the previous thread on this topic, we all have different ideas of what is appropriate, what fair costs should be, etc… This makes it near impossible for someone from the outside to make any sense of our Community.
I hope that a good discussion can be had at GITA or wherever. The longer we have no answer, the more irrelevant we become. The question is how long we wait for someone else to do something about it.
Aaron Addison
MsGIS, past Bentley employee (those evildoers of DGN), +10 year ArcGIS user, old time survey crew hand, +17 years in the engineering industry, and self proclaimed realist.
Aaron, I’ve got no problem with DGN per say, it just isn’t a good interchange format.
As for GITA, I think we should have a good discussion about this. I’ll see if I can get with Bob Samborski and get something worked out.
I worked at a local county in GA as a GIS intern when I was in college. They sell their data at $60 per DVD. You pick the data set from a list of avialable layers (including photography) and we compile and burn it. In addition, all the data was on a open to the public website. This saved the county the time and effort from trival data requests of people who didn’t know what they wanted in the first place and would just request ALL the data instead of thinking about what they really need. And I agree with the policy to charge something to make sure you really want it. But the prices need to be in check.
Google has established a fair-market price point for image data that it acquires – roughly 3cents on the original dollar.
That’s for pixels that are somewhere between 24 to 36 months old. Older data are tolerated as long as none newer are available, but the price goes down as age goes up.
Judging from their forays into vector-land, I suspect the ‘real’ fair-market value for points lines and polygons may well be less.
At the end of the day, there is *no* substantive fair market for someone else’s GIS data unless they have a vested and direct interest. That limits resale prospects remarkably when you look at market sizing and potential users around a city.
Charging anything more than cost recovery for the direct act of duplicating the content is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
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So will you have to get Arizona state laws changed? That might take a while! I note that the Law is very specific about the charge calculation, a portion of the collection costs, the work to export for you and then an assessment of what its worth in case they have not got a large enough figure!
We have a name and shame website in New Zealand for stonewalling Official Information requests. Maybe that would help show how to wear away the stone with dripping water?
Also here is something I found that I was interested in, and when it disappeared I put it up again.
I know that this word might invoke Godwin’s Law, it was originally on the Manifold site. How the world turns, James is sounding more like Dimitri every day!
I can see why they are trying to charge for commercial use. In the UK, agencies such as the Environment Agency will allow commercial companies to access their data if they pay a fee. The fee can be set as a % of the original cost of data collection. So if you want a flood model output that cost then 40k they would perhaps ask you to pay 5% of that. I often think that when the cost is much higher, it may suggest that they dont want to give the data to you at all and this may be a reflection of the quality of the data. Many large organisations data is pretty poor and they dont really want that fact exposed.
In the EA’s case, they have very tight budgets and were asked to try and generate income by the UK gov, hence the charging system. They pay to get the models run for them and the public. Why should some private company make cash on the back of that without subsidizing the original data collection? Their data is pretty good.
Dont know how relevant that is to your situation but thought i might contribute to the discussion.
@Addy,
“Why should some private company make cash on the back of that without subsidizing the original data collection?”
The short answer is they already do and they should.
If national, regional or local government department or state-funded other organisations, have collected or generated public sector information out of public funds (taxation), it is only ethical that this information should be made freely available to individual citizens or to commercial organisations whose taxes have paid for information collection or generation.
It is unacceptable that they should have to pay twice for something they have already financed (redistribution costs excepted). It is irrelevant whether the end-user of such information is a business or is in the business of reselling that information in raw or a modified form. Businesses pay taxes like everyone else, so they have a equal right to the information like everyone else. In fact from a financial perspective, it those businesses that commercialise freed public sector information rather than citizens, that have the greatest claim for PSI to be freed, as it is taxation on their profits from reselling/using and/or adding value to the information that pays for future PSI collection or generation, rather than the taxes collected from citizens.
Business do not necessarily pay municipal taxes though; depends on where the business has a presence. If it was federal information, I would agree with you completely (and most federal information is open). For local government though, the tax argument does not necessarily hold.
OK. The situation in the US is different than here in the UK. Over here businesses pay “business rates” to local government to pay for things such as roads, policing, fire service, street cleaning etc.
Okay – One more vote for ‘government (on EVERY level) is stupid’. Big surprise there. Absolutely shocking.
At the end of all this, though, I’m left with a burning to desire to know just how accurate Tempe’s data is. When you finally get your hands on the data, could you let us know how well it stacks up? I’d just like to know if $100,000 buys six figures worth of accuracy.
As I commented in a previous post, the precision of the COGO conversion of Tempe’s cadastral documents was 0.01 foot. The accuracy was checked by field survey to several hundred ground points and was within 0.5 foot in all cases at 2 sigma.
As also noted before, Tempe has sold its accurate landbase to a local utility for $180K, and it is in use by that utility to this day. The landbase has also been used in litigation, and has not been challenged.
Tempe’s return on its $400K+ investment in its landbase has been returned many times over to the City and its citizenry. When many other governmental entities were trace-digitizing hardcopy maps at a fraction of the cost of Tempe’s analytical conversion, Tempe took an expensive but justified business risk, and now the ROI continues, although apparently irksome to some literal “free market†advocates.
I’m still not getting what part of selling the data to willing commercial customers who in turn make their own profit on value-add is such a bad thing, albeit unconventional from the mindset of “government should provide everything for free”. However, I’m willing to be persuaded by *actual* examples of how turning over Tempe’s authoritative data for free would significantly increase the return to Tempe and its citizens. Likewise, I’d also like to hear about how Tempe’s “restrictive” policy has hurt the City in any substantive way.
One other note: although Tempe Engineering’s landbase data is in MicroStation design file format (a format that more readily facilitates engineering design usage), it is regularly converted to ArcGIS geodatabase format in SQL Server for Enterprise use.
Rudy Stricklan, RLS
Rudy,
I don’t live in Tempe, but in my city with Google’s switch over to their own dataset (from Tele Atlas) has caused us nothing but trouble. We get calls from citizens asking why we don’t give Google our data so that the maps can be updated.
We are working with Google to resolve this, but if we give the data to Google, why shouldn’t we give it to everyone for free?
And just for your information, government data should be in the public domain. Governments who lock this data up limit their citizens to ensure their government is doing a good job. We shouldn’t trust government to do what is best, history has proven this.
Tempe does not charge for non-commercial use of the data, so it is open to anyone asking for it on a non-commercial basis. It is not locked up.
Rudy Stricklan, RLS
I’ll also be blogging about how other cities and counties of AZ share their geo data. Let us just say Tempe is in the minority in that they give away their data free to citizens for non-commercial use. Most charge at least a couple hundred if not more (and some don’t even share the data). That said… somehow Pima County can give away their parcel data for free without restrictions non-commercial use.
http://www.dot.pima.gov/gis/data/contents/metadet.cfm?name=paregion
Apparently they do have a commercial license, but it is hidden on their webpage. http://www.dot.pima.gov/mapdis.cfm
Has Tempe responded to your request yet? If so are they going to give you everything you want?
I’d like to request the landbase and utilities for the whole city.
Right now I’ve only filled out a Public Records request. I should hear back today on what they are going to do. Tempe doesn’t charge for non-commercial requests so this should be easy. I’ll just take the DGN and load it up into PostGIS using FME Desktop and then I’ll be able to use it.
Send me the DGN and I’ll convert to something useful like a coverage or shapefile
Rudy:
“Tempe’s return on its $400K+ investment in its landbase has been returned many times over to the City and its citizenry.”
Are you saying the Tempe has actually made a profit on this data? If so, then they’ve clearly overpriced the data. The pricing is supposed to recover the acquisition costs, not create profit!
I’ve personally built around 100,000 parcels over the years for a few different entities including a small city where we were allowed by statute to recover nominal costs when members of the public asked for data.
Depending on how Tempe is trying to define ‘acquisition costs’, that cost may include the cost of the personnel who created the data and/or contract costs which obviously raises the $$$ quickly. If the cost is reasonable (and I’m not saying it necessarily is) why can’t they make a profit? Water/wastewater departments are revenue generating operations.
@Gurduloo
I’m not sure that is exactly what Rudy meant, but he does have a point. This investment has been returned many times over for the reasons he outlined (the airport suit and others). Therefor there is no reason to charge $100k for the data as it has already paid for itself. If this was available, Architects, Planners, Investors would have access to this data to invest in Tempe. Seems like it could keep giving back to the city as it tries to update itself in this recession.
Thanks for making the clarification, James. ROI is different from profit, and even governmental entities like to see what business case can be made for most expenditures. If the expenditure doesn’t return something in the way of improved services (often difficult to quanitfy, therefore difficult to sell), or direct revenue back (sells much easier, and usually provides ‘soft’ benefits as well). Also, any entity doing a project for the City gets the data at no charge, as my own firm does for work I do directly for the City. But you bring up an interesting point that I alluded to earlier. Those entities who would request it for verifiable betterment of Tempe citizens should be able to get it at no charge also. Maybe this creates another category of non-commercial sales, I don’t know. Glad you were able to reach the right folks in the Pyramid to get the data for your use, and provide light on this issue.
Rudy Stricklan, RLS
What I don’t get about Tempe’s position is what the point is? It has used taxpayer funds to create a very precise data set. As the explanation goes, it is so precise that it worth so much that no one can afford it.
What exactly would the problem be if Tempe gave the data away? Would this degrade the accuracy or authoritativeness of the data? Could some firm make money using the data? How exactly would Tempe be harmed?
“Tempe’s return on its $400K+ investment in its landbase has been returned many times over to the City and its citizenry.”
So it’s not really a matter of the money.
However, I’m willing to be persuaded by *actual* examples of how turning over Tempe’s authoritative data for free would significantly increase the return to Tempe and its citizens.
Oh wait, yes it is.
I wonder if any component of Tempe’s price tag is meant to facilitate data sharing agreements with bigger agencies/firms in the valley; e.g., “This data is worth 100k! We’ll gladly share it if you share your measly sub-foot accurate water and power system data of the entire valley.”
The more you charge for the commercial product, the more you can theoretically demand in sharing agreements based on the perceived value.
The problem here is not Tempe. It is at the state level. Arizona has extremely strict laws limiting GIS data sharing, I have yet to see another state take this limiting approach. The only way to fix this is at the state level. Get Arizona to see that they are the odd one out in this practice.
Arizona has to be shown that their restrictions to data sharing are actually actively harming the state and its citizens. It is not enough to tell them that everyone else is sharing & so should they. It must be documented how their intransigence is harming their economy, their citizens and therefore their tax base.
The state law says in part “The value of the reproduction on the commercial market as best determined by the public body.” That’s really broad. Its nearlly impossible to tell what the commercial market value is when there is a monopoly in place (which is the case with most government data), and almost impossible to argue against the ‘best’ determined value.
Tempe could charge anything and it would be in compliance with the law. Doesn’t make it right though…
Does anyone know the history of ARS §39-121.03? Who sponsored it and why? I tried to look it up, but see no way to do that?
The history reference for ARS §39-121.03 says:
Added by Laws 1977, Ch. 54, § 3, eff. May 17, 1977. Amended by Laws 1985, Ch. 213, § 4.
ASU has a good step by step guide for researching legislative history:
http://www.law.asu.edu/library/azlegislativehistory
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to those resources here… James? You do live in Tempe
James,
A response from any muni is good in regards to a data request. Once upon a time, Maricopa County charged up to $14,000 for their parcel database; now significantly lower (I think one of the aerial providers charges a fraction although it is useless after while without regular split/ownership updates).
What bothers me most is muni’s forget who paid them to create the data.. I wish I could charge up to six figures for the data I’ve created for clients..
I agree that government data should be in the public domain, but it is a stretch to argue that businesses should be allowed to access the data and profit from it freely simply because they pay corporate taxes.
As someone already pointed out, most companies do not pay taxes to every state, let alone municipality, in the US so the paying taxes argument starts to fall apart when talking about state and local government data.
When speaking about federal government data, the paying taxes argument is like saying the US Department of Defense should allow me to fly an F-16 for free whenever I want because I pay taxes. Realistically, the proportion of any one person’s or corporation’s taxes that go to build a fighter jet or collect a specific government data set is so minuscule that the benefit to a corporation is disproportionate relative to its taxes when there is no fee involved in making a profit from the data.
My two cents is that paying taxes should guarantee access to information but not the right to profit from that information. Now how much should be charged for the right to profit from it is debatable.
In the E9-1-1 world I am aware of cities/counties/states that freely give GIS data they build and maintain, such as accurate address ranged road centerlines, to commercial vendors such as NAVTEQ for no cost, even if commercial profit is derived from the data.
The rational – the faster correct street names and address ranges get into the public domain, and peoples’ PNDs, the safer the public is. Better if we’re all looking at the same maps, goes the argument. Plus creation and maintnance of those GIS data sets are also funded by 9-1-1 surcharges on phone bills, that everybody pays.
Excellent point. I had forgotten about all the E911 addressing work we did in New Mexico and all those shapefiles (and a lot more data) are available on the RGIS website for free.
In my experience, Navteq will not take e911 data anyway, so there is no concern about them deriving commercial profit from it.
Parcel data is really where the significant issue is.
911 surcharges do not pay one red cent of creation and maintenance of gis data sets. Every last cent goes directly to the phone companies themselves to maintain their 911 equipment.
(Yes, I work in e911 GIS for a pretty large county.)
I’m curious, which schools are you working with for this “GIS Day?” Sounds interesting.
John, good point. I thought about the same issue you raise after I had posted my original comment. If a local, state, or federal government believes it is in its best interest to make the data freely available to a business, even one making profit from it, I would defer to them on whether it is in the taxpayers’ and citizens’ best interests to do so. My original comment was meant to address the situation where a business is requesting the information and the governmental organization does not see the benefit of fulfilling the request.
What’s wrong with businesses making a profit from free government data collected at taxpayer expense even if the government doesn’t see the benefit of fulfilling the request? Imagine what life would be like if the Census Bureau had decided to go with cost-recovery with the TIGER line files for the 1990 Census? Its unlikely there would have been Wessex, MapQuest, Navtek, or TeleAtlas. The return back to the economy is exponentially greater than if the data would have been sold to recover the costs of creating it.
Having worked in both government critical infrastructure (where they do not distribute whole datasets) and private consuting (where you want all you can get for free) I have been around this argument before.
One case I have heard relative to this issue, which I do not pretend to fully understand the implications of, is this Supreme court case: http://www.librarycopyright.net/wiki/index.php?title=Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co._Inc.
I have no time to argue for one side or the other right now. It could be that it cost the city $100,000+ in staff time and overhead to create the dataset, in fact that is probably a low estimate, but it is obviously cost prohibitive to sell the data for that.
One thing I wil say, when we had to provide parcel data to clients we would scramble the information. Our prime concern was that addresses and names could be used for mailing lists, or malicious puropses that would jeopardize citizens privacy. Of course much info could be gathered on the county assessor website pertaining to owner, address, property value etc, that information is usually limited.
Wow, this sounds like Santa Clara County CA
I think the cost of duplication is BS, too. Perhaps they can upload their data to AGS Online.
James, any word from Tempe? Did they fulfill your request?
No word from Tempe on my request other than to say they received it and would get back to me the next day.
I plan to follow up this week with them.
Can’t say that I’m surprised they didn’t get back to you. They probably hope you’ll just go away and they can get back to ignoring sharing data with their citizens.
i heard a rumor that AGIC recently changed the rules on data fees. have you heard anything about that? if so how would it impact tempe data fees?
Well, government agencies need some way to recover all the money they’ve wasted, um, er, invested on overpriced GIS software and consulting.
In the end, it winds up in some vendor’s pocket.