Sunday, March 15, 2009

Declinging Property Values Affect Local Governments

This article from LA Times is one of many we have run across recently that describe the affects of declining real estate values on local governments. Because so many local governments depend on real estate taxes as their primary source of funding, the declining value base will have a large ripple affect on local budgets.

At the GIS and CAMA conference in Charleston SC in February (http://www.urisa.org/conferences/cama/program) Robert Scripture of Oakland County Michigan gave a presentation on how CAMA data can be used to predict this loss in revenue to help local officials plan for these changes. We will post his presentation to the national cad web site when it is available.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Mortgage Stakeholders Meeting Scheduled for May 7, 2009

The Mortgage Stakeholders meeting has been scheduled for May 7, 2009 in Washington DC. This meeting is part of the task assigned to the FGDC Subcommittee related to the Mortgage Study and will include invitees from Treasury, HUD and other agencies that need to monitor, track or analyze real estate mortgage trends. The purpose of the meeting will be to demonstrate the use of parcel data to support the needs of these stekholders and to verify the processes these stakeholders use to define which elements could be related to individual parcel data. The supposition is that national parcel data could provide more detailed, current and accurate information for federal stakeholders.