A California appeals court ruled that a public agency does not have to provide public access to a geographic information system or GIS database under the state’s Public Records Act. The court denied the Sierra Club’s bid to make public the Orange County Landbase, a parcel map showing over 640,000 parcels with street addresses and names of owners. The county wanted $375,000 for the entire Landbase system.
In their opinion, the court wrote that the county was justified in charging the fee under state law, ” A computer mapping database is not excluded ‘merely’ because it is stored on a computer, but because its development is time-consuming and costly and the Legislature has made a policy decision that local governments should be allowed to recoup some of their development costs.” -db
From Metropolitan News Enterprise, June 1, 2011, by Kenneth Ofgang.
One Comment
This case has been accepted by the California Supreme Court. The link to this story doesn’t work, incidentally.
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