Between the Poles: Orange County parcel file now freely downloadable

Geoff Zeiss

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August 07, 2013

Orange County parcel file now freely downloadable

I blogged previously about a court case involving Orange County in California about open access to county GIS data under California's Public Records Acts (PRA).

After trying to obtain Orange County's parcel file at the cost of reproduction, in 2009 the Sierra Club initiated a lawsuit against Orange County under the PRA. May 31, 2011 a California appelate court decided in favour of Orange County which charged $375,000 for their parcel database.

On Monday, July 8, 2013, the California Supreme Court reversed the previous 4th District Court of Appeal ruling in favor of Orange County. As a result, GIS data owned by all parts of California government - is now public record available for the cost of duplication.

Orange County Parcel File is now available for download.

"The G.L.I.S Landbase Information Systems Section is where the County of Orange Landbase is generated and updated. This unit prepares and maintains an information system consisting of a very accurate, parcel-level digital basemap containing over 665,000 parcels.

"The Landbase contains street centerlines, right-of-way lines, and parcel boundaries, linked to text information, such as assessor parcel number. The foundation of this system is the County Control Network consisting of over 2400 control points on an approximate half-mile grid. This strong foundation makes the County Landbase very accurate and allows new map information to be added without losing any accuracy.

The Landbase is available for download in ESRI shape format listed below:"

You can download it here.

Posted at 09:34 AM in Access to Spatial Data, Land management, Open Data, Parcel fabric, Spatial Data | Permalink

Comments

Just vectors w/ an ID. No address,landuse or anything usable -naturally.

Posted by: b | August 07, 2013 at 11:54 AM

You have to laugh! Orange County somehow managed to have their parcel database declared "software" and thus not subject to California's PRA.

The only remaining question is why this decision took years instead of minutes.

Posted by: David Sonnen | August 07, 2013 at 03:06 PM

Awesome. The lack of compliance with 1996 E-FOIA is what put the first company that I worked for out of business. Taxes pay for this data collection, thus the data should be freely available to tax payers.

Posted by: Chris Andrews | August 07, 2013 at 03:41 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

July 2023

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August 07, 2013

Orange County parcel file now freely downloadable

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