A California county's three-year battle to prevent a nonprofit group from obtaining public mapping data has ended disastrously for the county after it was ordered by a court to pay the group $500,000 in legal costs.
Last February, Santa Clara County, the heart of California's Silicon Valley, was ordered to hand over the public records to the California First Amendment Coalition for a minimal duplication fee after initially trying to charge $250,000 for the data and then appealing to the federal government to designate the data a national security secret that couldn't be released. This week the county paid out to the coalition twice the amount in legal fees that it had once hoped to rake in as profit for the data.
“It sends a very, very clear message that if they ignore their obligations under our open government laws, they better treat that as a real liability,” Peter Scheer, executive director of the coalition, told the San Jose Mercury News.
In 2006, the coalition used the state's sunshine law to ask for a digital, data-rich map compiled by the county. Called a geographic information system, or GIS, parcel basemap database, the map shows the boundaries of 450,000 real estate parcels in Silicon Valley, along with overlaid aerial photos, street addresses and other data.
The county demanded $250,000 for the information, along with a signed nondisclosure agreement asserting that the coalition wouldn't redistribute it, even though other California counties provide the same data for free or charge a minimal duplication fee.
When the coalition balked at paying the astronomical price for public data and filed suit, the county resorted to a number of arguments to keep the information secret, claiming first that the data was copyrighted, and then that its release would harm the county's "national security" because the maps contained information about water supply pipelines.
A California appeals court didn't buy the national security claim, since the county had previously sold the data to anyone who paid its asking price. After ruling that the data should be released, the appeals court sent the case back to the trial court to address the issue of legal costs.
Acting Santa Clara County counsel Miguel Márquez expressed no regrets for a suit that ultimately cost county taxpayers much more than the half a million they paid this week to the coalition's lawyers.
"Hindsight is always 20-20," Márquez told the Mercury News, noting that the county had been stymied by a law that he said was unclear. "It was one of those cases that needed to be tried and for which we needed guidance from the court."
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