Clare MI, Civic Address Data

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to Michigan's Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), I hereby request the following records:

A Shapefile or CSV containing at minimum the Address Points (house # and street name) and their corresponding Latitude/Longitude. If additional data such as the Unit Number, City, Zipcode, Parcel Id exists they should be included as well.

If this cannot be accessed, the parcel file including situs address would suffice.

Other names for this include: E911 Address Database, Civic Address File, Parcel Dataset, Land Ownership Dataset, Tax Parcels, Address Points.

I also intent to publish the data via the OpenAddresses Publication platform and would request a waiver of fees for the request.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Nick Ingalls

Hello Dawn,

Unfortunately this charge seems excessive for the request being made.Per MCL Section 15.234 Sec 4 of the Freedom of Information Act - Act 442 of 1976, the fee should be based on the actual cost to duplicate the records.
In the past counties typically either provide the data for free or charge $25 to $50 dollars for an hour of the lowest paid employees time.

If the fee quoted is the actual cost to duplicate the records please include a complete breakdown of how the fee will be used for the duplication.

Cheers,
Nick

Hello Dawn,

Thanks for clarifying the fees.

4 years ago I cofounded OpenAddresses.io with the intent of making civic address data easier to find, manage and build awesome tools with - Since then the project has taken off
from disaster relief, to Search and Rescue, to finding your local bakery, developers have taken the data that we publish and done some incredible things with them!

That said we are an entirely volunteer organization and depend on a small number of donations every year to keep our servers hosting the data and pay for the occasional FOIA fee.
Unfortunately this means it can be difficult to obtain funding for data that we would otherwise love to obtain. In this case the fees scheduled would exceed our total expenditure for the
past 4 years.

Civic Addresses are the glue that connects the digital world to the physical one, connecting vast troves of records to the real world and we would love the county of wexford to join
the growing number of counties and states and provide us data by waiving or reducing fees and allowing us to standardize, remix, and share civic addresses.

I would love for you to check out our current progress at: http://results.openaddresses.io/

Cheers,
Nick