Latest Contributions by StephanieMagnan

A late addition to the conversation, but I've worked in several jurisdictions in my career. When I started working in the public sector in 1996, there was a big push to try to recoup costs for duplicating data (cost for both media replacement and personnel resources). Utility data was, as another poster has said, the domain of the private sector, or at least a quasi-governmental organization, but also has some pretty significant public safety issues around it (critical infrastructure, etc). So utilities have generally been handled separately from the larger portion of public data. At this point, I feel that most jurisdictions that have the capability and the capacity are moving toward (if not already) providing as much as possible for free via portals and in some cases FTP download. It's a matter of a) not charging the public (again) for data that technically they pay for b) it's really not possible to recoup costs for handling and distributing data c) there is a fairly common expectation that public data which does not have PII or PHI, should be available for free and easily accessible. I've seen several cases in which a jurisdiction doesn't have the capacity to publish itself, and instead works with a regional group to provide data downloads as a service to the community. ... View more

Welcome Stephanie! The geography GIS community is what makes the profession so fun. ... View more