An interesting bit of naivete from Rob Rhinehart here:
Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to maintain this data
Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate, inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on.
I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of GIS.
Regarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given property.
There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit a small number of people equipped to exploit them.
I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.
Working with landmen and title companies in Texas has taught me that even the best kept computer GIS records are probably wrong. This goes for regular property as well as mineral leasing. The amount of records for one sublease are simply staggering. We are currently doing a digitizing and OCR of historical well records from 1980 to current and the amount of paperwork fills a 40x30 storage building ceiling to floor. This is only for a few thousand wells. I've seen title searches for large families where there wasn't a will set up end up with a sack of near 1000 printed pages. Detangling property rights in areas with a lot of history, and mineral rights separated from land rights is a damned nightmare.
So you can't figure out just how much land the county commissioners wife really owns...
Literally. And if you should attempt to disambiguate all the trusts and LLCs and special purpose vehicles to figure out who really owns what in your county; you can expect a visit from law enforcement.
The US may look clean and consistently score low on measures of corruption; but it's there, especially at the county level.
I think it's a bit far to say that most counties are deliberately obfuscating data. That said, many counties, such as the one I live in, run on a shoestring budget and can't keep up with the current request load - the overhead for modernization or even corrections doesn't seem to exist, and the whole situation is made worse by the standard "pace of government." There's nothing like local politics to delay any kind of large-scale project.
The end result is that I wouldn't be surprised if, nationally, enormous binders are more common than GIS. The property records in my county are in the form of yellowing pages in 20-pound leather post binders on those rolling high-density shelves. People complaining about 2 minute query times? Here you drive to the county clerk's office, ask them your question, and they might be able to tell you which of the giant binders to look in first. The upside is that if you ask nicely they'll let you use their photocopier.
Perhaps we're unusually backwards, this is New Mexico after all, but we're not the smallest county in this state by far - and certainly not in the nation.
Comments
An interesting bit of naivete from Rob Rhinehart here:
Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to maintain this data
Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate, inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on.
I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of GIS.
Why do counties deliberately obfuscate corrupt this data?
Regarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given property.
There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit a small number of people equipped to exploit them.
I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.
Working with landmen and title companies in Texas has taught me that even the best kept computer GIS records are probably wrong. This goes for regular property as well as mineral leasing. The amount of records for one sublease are simply staggering. We are currently doing a digitizing and OCR of historical well records from 1980 to current and the amount of paperwork fills a 40x30 storage building ceiling to floor. This is only for a few thousand wells. I've seen title searches for large families where there wasn't a will set up end up with a sack of near 1000 printed pages. Detangling property rights in areas with a lot of history, and mineral rights separated from land rights is a damned nightmare.
So you can't figure out just how much land the county commissioners wife really owns...
Literally. And if you should attempt to disambiguate all the trusts and LLCs and special purpose vehicles to figure out who really owns what in your county; you can expect a visit from law enforcement.
The US may look clean and consistently score low on measures of corruption; but it's there, especially at the county level.
I think it's a bit far to say that most counties are deliberately obfuscating data. That said, many counties, such as the one I live in, run on a shoestring budget and can't keep up with the current request load - the overhead for modernization or even corrections doesn't seem to exist, and the whole situation is made worse by the standard "pace of government." There's nothing like local politics to delay any kind of large-scale project.
The end result is that I wouldn't be surprised if, nationally, enormous binders are more common than GIS. The property records in my county are in the form of yellowing pages in 20-pound leather post binders on those rolling high-density shelves. People complaining about 2 minute query times? Here you drive to the county clerk's office, ask them your question, and they might be able to tell you which of the giant binders to look in first. The upside is that if you ask nicely they'll let you use their photocopier.
Perhaps we're unusually backwards, this is New Mexico after all, but we're not the smallest county in this state by far - and certainly not in the nation.
Many countries don't even have a single working system of address...let alone town planning.