Re: [open-twin-cities] City data on storm drains

[Kyle Rosenberg]

I was thinking the same thing on Sunday when I had to take a lengthy detour on my way to the Riverview.

I emailed Lane Christianson in public works, inquiring about storm drain locations for my neighborhood, and also inquired about the availability of GIS data. He sent me a custom-made map for Longfellow (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B07dAQJxAkeBQ3MzWFdzN2NiZDA&usp=drive_web), and referred me to John Studmann (contact info below).

If anyone wants to contact John for the data, please feel free. Let us know if you're successful!

Forwarded message:

Kyle,

 

I attached 2 maps:  One showing storm drains/catch basins only & and 2^nd showing the storm pipes & sizes in the Longfellow neighborhood.

 

In regard to your request for GIS data, I am referring you to the data steward for Minneapolis Surface Water & Sewers division, John Studtmann.  He can be reached atJohn.St...@minneapolismn.gov or 612-673-2986.

 

Let me know if these maps meets your needs.

 

Best,

 

Lane Christianson 
Minneapolis Public Works 
Surface Water & Sewers Division 
( (612) 673.2522 
<  (612) 280.1956 
* lane.chr...@minneapolismn.gov

Learn an interesting fact about Minneapolis by clicking here.  

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Peter Fleck <pfh...@gmail.com> wrote:

This just came through the Seward Neighbors Forum.

Does anyone know how to locate the storm drains that are currently buried under feet of snow and ice? My intersection had several inches of standing water this weekend (and it may be worse this afternoon). I routinely clear them of leaves, etc. during summer storms so I put on my wellies and took my ice chopper and went looking for the drains, but could only find a manhole cover, which I cleared of ice. I've looked thru the City's web site and learned a lot about storm water run-off, but nothing about how to located the drains. Any help is appreciated!

I'm sure the City has the data and here is a good reason for them to share it. They could even start a program (Liberate Your Storm Drain!) to get citizen help in opening the drains.

Peter

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[MaryJo Webster]

This discussion about storm sewer drain locations, got me to thinking this would be a great service the Pioneer Press (my employer) could provide to our readers. So one of my colleagues put in requests to both St Paul and Minneapolis asking for their GIS shapefile with locations of the drains. Here's the result:

ST PAUL: We did not have to file a formal request. They emailed us the shapefile within a couple hours after our initial contact. No charge.

MINNEAPOLIS: It took several days to get a response and when we did, they said it would cost $81 PER HOUR, for about 3 hours of work and that it would be at least 5 to 10 business days before we'd actually get the data (in other words, after the snow will have all melted!). We emailed back asking how they came up with the $81 per hour because the Data Practices Act requires them to charge no more than the hourly rate of the "lowest-paid" person who is capable of doing the work. And nobody in that office makes $81 per hour. 

Here's the response:

Greetings.  The staff person has an hourly rate of $32.40.  Per the statute language below, for data “developed with a significant expenditure of public funds by the public entity, the responsible authority may charge a reasonable fee for the information in addition to the costs of making and certifying the copies.”  I used a factor of 2.5 times the hourly rate, a typical approach for charging fees for data developed with a significant expenditure of public funds.

 

I estimate three hours.

 

--------------------------------------------------------

This is absolutely insane. And clearly goes against the open data environment that Otto Doll said he's promoting. 

MaryJo

MaryJo Webster

Senior Data Reporter

Digital First Media

mweb...@digitalfirstmedia.com

(651) 491-6576 (cell)

@MaryJoDFM

[Steven Clift]

Check out:

http://forums.e-democracy.org/r/topic/4X0R0RMCgJas9u2HxVTLbE

Tip: use Google Maps satellite view to locate the drain. It made the job a lot
easier when I had some landmarks to work from. Then I just had to make a small
channel to the approximate location and the water did the rest.

If your drain is obscured by shade, try the street view. :)
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org
Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy
Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072

>> can be reached atJohn.S...@minneapolismn.gov or 612-673-2986.

[MaryJo Webster]

Pioneer Press published a map this afternoon with the St. Paul storm drains....

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_25344838/street-flooding-melting-snow-find-your-storm-drain

MaryJo Webster

Senior Data Reporter

Digital First Media

mweb...@digitalfirstmedia.com

(651) 491-6576 (cell)

@MaryJoDFM

[Alan Palazzolo]

Awesome, quick work!

--
Alan Palazzolo
Code for America
2011 Fellow
al...@codeforamerica.org
+1 770 596 1951

[Fred H Olson]

I've chopped ice to the street drains on 12th Av N just west of
Penn Av N TWICE in the last few weeks. I had to do the one on the
south side again after it got clogged again.
The second time I chopped a trench about a foot from the curb (I think)
for 3-4 feet the wrong direction before I went the other direction
and found the drain. This is despite seeing the location a few weeks
before.

The maps that have been published tell the approximate location but to
chop ice to a drain one needs to know more accurately where the drain
is.

St Paul:
http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_25344838/street-flooding-melting-snow-find-your-storm-drain

Mpls Longfellow:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B07dAQJxAkeBQ3MzWFdzN2NiZDA&usp=drive_web

I have used Google Street view but even that is not as good as
would be desireable - often you can only see the drain only at an angle too
great to accurately place the drain. Street view is more effective for finding
hydrants since they are much more prominent.

I've resolved to make measurements inches from trees, sign posts etc for 6
blocks in my neighborhood after the snow melts.

Has anyone tried a metal detector? I dont have one.

BTW I use a "Mutt" root chopper that weighs nearly 5 pounds - much
heavier than the typical chopper that resembles a garden hoe without
the bend. I put a picture at
http://fholson.cohousing.org/pix/mutt-ice-chopper.jpg
A pick axe is another alternative but I find more tiring and harder to
aim.

Fred

--
Fred H. Olson Minneapolis,MN 55411 USA (near north Mpls)
Email: fholson at cohousing.org 612-588-9532
My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org My org:
Communications for Justice -- Free, superior listserv's w/o ads

[Steven Clift]

A victory for openness in sharing data from St. Paul and media collaboration:

http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/stpaul-issues/messages/topic/6ceY8wJwQmfaalHMxbBCAv

Way to go City if St. Paul and the Pioneer Press!

Pool party in Minneapolis where we'd rather be swimming in open data. :-)

For those on the cc: see:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/twin-cities-brigade/qqVteWWE6OA

In short, despite an open data resolution adopted by the city council in Dec., Minneapolis sought to charge for the data and required a formal data request as I understand it. St. Paul just zipped their data over to the Pioneer Press quickly so the info could reach tens of thousands with a map containing urgent information.

I am confident this blip and slowness in Minneapolis crime data being fairly opened to all and not just a chosen company are just minor road bumps in what will become the most open and accessible data city government the world. Water, not open data should go down the drain.

Steven Clift - cl...@e-democracy.org
+1 612 234 7072

[MaryJo Webster]

I thought I'd share an update on this...

The Pioneer Press kept asking questions of Minneapolis Public Works and FINALLY today broke through the problem --- the person we were talking to at public works thought we wanted a map of the entire pipe system, not just the drain locations. She says we should have the map by the end of the day and they would only charge for 1 hour of work.

This kind of "misunderstanding" is very common, in my experience. It's especially troubling in this situation because my colleague who's working on this picked up the phone and called last week in an effort to make sure their initial reaction (lots of hours and lots of money) wasn't a case of a misunderstanding.  It would've been helpful if the person at public works had simply asked a question such as, "So am I understanding correctly that you want a map that shows where all the pipes run?" 

MaryJo

MaryJo Webster

Senior Data Reporter

Digital First Media

mweb...@digitalfirstmedia.com

(651) 491-6576 (cell)

@MaryJoDFM

--

[Alan Palazzolo]

Thanks for the follow-up, MaryJo.

<rant>
I think this is an excellent example for why Open Data, the idea of
putting data online and in a digital format, is so important. The
great work that many have done to get our government data public in a
legal sense is amazing, but there are still huge barriers to getting
that data into the hands of people that need it.

One of the biggest is the human factor. When making a data request,
it has to go through a person. This means that all the problems and
issues (and some benefits) of human communication come into play. For
instance, communication failure, like in this story. But there is
also all the personal issues that we as people have when dealing with
each other. This creates a large inefficiency and bias to who and how
people get data. Data is already biased by itself, there’s no reason
to allow more of it to happen.
</rant>

--
Alan Palazzolo
Code for America
2011 Fellow
al...@codeforamerica.org
+1 770 596 1951

[MaryJo Webster]

Excellent rant Alan!

I'm also dealing with public salary data file requests right now and I'm amazed at how difficult this is every year. This is the fifth year I've asked for this data --- every year, I ask for the same thing. I make the request in the same month every year. This year I put the requests in on Jan 27.  I got the majority of them last week -- after sending reminder emails -- and I'm still waiting on one (I bet you can guess which city it is based on my previous emails in this thread!?). Crazy. This is another example where the agency should just create the file in January, post it somewhere and let me go grab it. I could automate the whole process.

MaryJo Webster

Senior Data Reporter

Digital First Media

mweb...@digitalfirstmedia.com

(651) 491-6576 (cell)

@MaryJoDFM

[CJ Sinner]

An update (Hi, all, I'm MaryJo's colleague working on the map):

We agreed to pay the $81 to get the shapefiles from Mpls and republished the map last night with both datasets. (same link, just more datapoints!). 

One other odd thing that happened is that they sent us a "User Agreement," disclaiming all responsibility for the "accuracy, correctness and completeness" of the data (so I guess we'll never know if they only sent us half the storm drains!) and then asking the user to agree to defend the City against any claims related to the data. We, for obvious reasons, said we would not agree to that second part -- no way are we going to defend the City in a court of law -- and they said that was fine, but then also added in an email that they didn't want us to share the shapefiles with anyone, so I had to calmly explain that by virtue of publishing a KML file on Google Maps, anyone with an internet connection could download the data. Their problem would have been us sharing the collection of shapefiles for ArcGIS, but practically speaking, a KML does roughly the same thing. They were fine with it, but it still struck me as odd. Maybe all of that was boilerplate, but when you stop to think about what the potential implications those agreements could have, we had reason to push back a little.

ANYWAY -- I'll send Alan the KML files for both cities separately and together sometime today so he can put them on the data dump site for Open Twin Cities on Socrata. 

It may have taken a while, but I'd call this one a win, right?

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[Bill Bushey]

Bravo CJ. Thanks to you and MaryJo and your colleagues for getting the data and putting up this map that I know a number of residents have been looking for recently.

Regarding your experience with the user agreement that the city tried to institute, it definitely represents a common theme that keeps popping up in open data discussions. There's ambiguity and misunderstanding about what the city's liability is for the quality of data they release and the uses it is put to after data is released. That's compounded by the fact that the city operates as a number of fairly independent organizations. I know Alan and MaryJo have run into these kinds of agreements before (though, this is the first time I've heard of the city asking that a data request defend the city in court).

-Bill

[Alan Palazzolo]

(removing non-open-twin-cities recipients)

Great work, CJ!

It is a real shame that you had to pay $81 and that you were asked to
sign that agreement.

When I first started making data requests to the City of Minneapolis a
couple years ago, I would get those, but had thought through the
positive talks with the IT department and other positive conversations
and motions, that the agreement had gone away. The agreements stifle
use and innovation to much greater degree than the liability
protection they provide, in my opinion.

We received a very negative response from the City about MinnPost’s
recent snow emergency application which may have sparked more
restriction.

I am no lawyer, but as far as I am aware, there is nothing in the DPA
or in Minneapolis ordinance that says that 1) a user agreement is
needed, and 2) that people that use the data have to agree to it (your
readers don’t agree to it). Which means I really don’t think there is
any reason you could not share that data with any one else.

On the technical side, the KML is no different from the original
Shapefile and the suggestion that it somehow warrants a difference in
use is a very bad understanding of data and data formats, in my
opinion.

On a related note. Adopt-a-Drain is fairly common official and
unofficial program of cities, much like the Adopt-a-Hydrant. It’s the
same sort of crowd-sourcing principle as the more popular
Adopt-a-Highway. In fact the same AdoptA application that powers the
OTC TC Adopt-A-Hydrant app powers this Oakland Adopt-a-Drain:
http://adoptadrainoakland.com/

Best,

--
Alan Palazzolo
Code for America
2011 Fellow
al...@codeforamerica.org
+1 770 596 1951

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