The assessment community played an integral part in a six-month study researching the needs and issues associated with the use of online parcel data that won an award at an international conference in January.

Challenges of Treating Information as a Public Resource: The Case of Parcel Data, written by Sharon S. Dawes, Meghan E. Cook, and Natalie Helbig of the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany/SUNY, was awarded best paper in the EGovernment Track at the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) is an applied research center devoted to improving government and public services through policy, management, and technology innovation.

The study was conducted from September 2004 through February 2005. The data consist of 35 interviews plus background information provided by ORPS, and official publications and web sites prepared by federal, state, local, nonprofit, and private sector organizations.

Under the Real Property Tax Law, ORPS shares authority and responsibilities with county and municipal governments. The study therefore began with the selection of five demographically, operationally, and geographically diverse counties in New York State. The county director within each county was asked to suggest people to be interviewed who use or otherwise interact with that county’s parcel data. Accordingly, interviewees were identified in public, private, and non-profit organizations that collect, prepare, and use parcel data created by the real property tax administration in each county. Besides ORPS, other state agencies were also included in the study.

The study documented the many ways in which parcel data is fundamentally important to a wide range of stakeholders. These stakeholders are public, private, and non profit organizations, as well as individuals. They use parcel data for many purposes of personal, commercial, and civil value. While the researchers’ findings demonstrate these potential benefits, they also reveal the key difficulties of treating parcel data as a collective information resource:

• The flow of parcel data has developed around a single planned purpose (tax administration) but it has evolved to include many additional purposes served mostly by ad hoc arrangements.
• Most data is collected at the municipal level and most municipalities are small and lack the budgetary resources to expand their roles as data suppliers.
• Under law, authority and responsibility for parcel data is distributed among many organizations at the state, county, and municipal levels. As a consequence, changes in the treatment of parcel data will require a high degree of consensus.

The award-winning report can be read on the CTG website (pdf version).