Fee payment allowed residents access to important home insurance
information
Fee payment allowed residents access to important home insurance information
n By Serdar Tumgoren Staff Writer
Gilroy – A leading open-government group in California has sued Santa Clara County for charging “prohibitively high fees” for electronic mapping data.
The California First Amendment Coalition argues in its law suit – filed last week in superior court – that fees running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars effectively deny access to information that could help residents determine if their homes are properly assessed, or if they are paying appropriate rates for flood or home insurance.
“The county, through the combination of prohibitively high fees and restrictions on use of the data, has created a monopoly,” said Peter Scheer, CFAC’s executive director. “Our law suit seeks to break down this monopoly and make the mapping data available to the people who paid for it – namely, the public.”
The mapping data are part of Santa Clara County’s geographic information system, or GIS, which provides a computerized, visual depiction of all land in the county. The so-called “base map” requested by CFAC is the foundation of the GIS and shows such things as the boundaries of all property parcels, the tax assessor’s parcel number for all properties, and the street address for each parcel. Additional data layers include public utilities, soil survey information, ambulance response areas, geological fault lines, flood zones, noise areas.
The county currently offers the base map data to the public at fees that are vastly higher than what the Public Records Act allows. The fee for county-wide parcel information, for example, is approximately $250,000. In addition, those receiving the data are required by the county to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
CFAC invoked the California Public records Act and Proposition 59, an open-government amendment that received overwhelming support from state voters in 2004, in arguing that the digital files are public documents and that copies should be released.
The county argues that the data is copyrighted information exempt from disclosure under the Public Records Act. At the same time, the county is planning to post some of the data online, though the degree of accessibility remains unclear.
Susan Swain, deputy legal counsel for the county, could not say if the county would offer broad swaths of data or more limited access related to individual parcels.
The difference often proves vital in monitoring government and the business community. For instance, anyone can use the Web to check the last year’s worth of inspection data on a restaurant (http://decadeonline.com/main.phtml?agency=scc). But to isolate food facilities with a history of serious health code violations, a resident would need inspection data spanning several years (The county currently makes this information available upon request).
When it comes to GIS data, Swain said the county’s plan to post the information online strikes a balance between the public’s right of access and the county’s need to recoup the costs of compiling the information.
“If we couldn’t charge for it, we wouldn’t be able to create and maintain it in the first place,” Swain said.
The sentiment was echoed by Don Gage, the supervisor representing South County.
“We pay for that information and it’s not public information,” he said. “If people want it, they’ll have to pay for it.”
Swain said the county has spent $2.5 million compiling the data. She could not say by press time who has purchased the information, or how much revenue it has generated for the county.
