Unless NACo or NSGIC have some funding to hand out, then what else might they offer to the Local Govs as an incentive? Advice and "best practices" papers won't solve this problem. That measly little $14k won't be enough to solve the problem either.

Most of these smaller shops are on a bare-bones budget and staff are spread paper thin as it is. $14k won't buy both the server hardware and commercial mapserver/spatial database server software, if the Local Gov makes the "traditional" commercial GIS software choice. It will not be enough to purchase an extra dev/test server, or cover system life cycle maintenance costs, or cross-train staff members so that there is some skills redundancy. And if the network bandwidth is low and slow, it won't be enough to cover the necessary upgrades.

If, however, Local Govs are willing take a more progressive approach. they can use freely available Open Source GIS software products instead (ex: PostGIS+Mapserver+GeoMoose or PostGIS+GeoServer+OpenLayers) to lower the startup-costs. That's going to be a harder sell, but it is getting easier. This is just about the only way that $14k would be enough get a Local Gov operational, even at a minimal level. It would buy a couple of entry level commodity boxes for the mapserver and the database server. It would also buy a few days of contract systems integrator assistance helping them get the software and their map services set up initially.

As soon as the hardware breaks or the person who initially worked with the contractor and learned how to do basic maintenance of the system moves on, there won't be any available resources to keep the map/data services going. Of course, this would be the situation regardless of whether commercial or open source software was used. This is strictly a resources (or lack thereof) issue.

In order for high resolution spatial data to flow reliably upwards from the local sources both to higher levels of government and to the public in a sustainable next generation NSDI, there will have to be an adequate level of recurring funding and ongoing technical assistance available to local jurisdictions. Many State agencies are also operating under the same resource-challenged conditions. Expecting the occasional (tiny), one-time bit of grant funding to solve this problem on a national level is, well, laughable.

What it really boils down to is that if updated local spatial data is to become the highly available, critical national public information resource it should be; then both the production operations of the local data stewards and each of the local nodes in an NSDI "system of systems" must be adequately funded on a permanent basis. This will be near impossible to do solely at the local or state level, even in very good years. Those officials who control funding do not currently consider this to be a "critical need". In some places it may be in the first round of stuff sent to the chopping block when the call goes out for agencies to slash their budgets by 10%....

Budget writers must undergo a fundamental shift in their perception of the true economic and strategic value of spatial data before they get to the place where they understand that it is not just another unnecessary "big government" program to waste taxpayers dollars. This is where recurring Federal program cost-shares several orders of magnitude larger than anything we've seen before will have to come into play. It's the only thing that will work. Find the Federal Agency that is most closely related to the State and Local programs producing the data and have them tie recurring local program funding cost-shares to measurable outcomes for maintaining the data, metadata, and the live map/data web services. Make it part of the overall "bean count", instead of a separate GIS-specific funding thing.

It is time for some "funded mandates"! I think this would help eliminate the 'holdup' faster than most anything else would.

What's that I hear? Some noise from the private engineering/mapping/survey industry about how government data production and mapping should always be privatized? Oh, please! We all know that outsourcing the work will only make it that much more expensive. If job creation is on the agenda, why not create 10 local & state gov jobs instead of 5 private sector jobs? True, public servants deserve more equitable pay, but since they aren't going to get it, they do need the program resources to do the basic mapping and data dissemination jobs properly. Last thing we need to do is completely privatize the national mapping/GIS effort!

We need to keep our critical public spatial data resources free, in open formats, and firmly in the public domain...

I should clarify - don't have any issue with the public sector outsourcing the acquisition and production of massive framework raster datasets such as high resolution orthophotography and lidar-derived elevation models to the private sector. That's the only thing that makes sense in those particular cases. The primary concern is with critical framework vector data production and maintenance. Certain very large layers with substantial engineering requirements, such as updated stream centerlines and flood zone mapping, will benefit from public-private partnerships that result in the contracting of data development services to private sector firms. But the majority of the other critical vector data layers such as tax mapping parcels, street centerlines, bridge locations, 911 address point locations, water & sewer lines, and permitted/regulated facility locations for hazardous materials and a whole host of other environmental interests are integral to Local and State Agency missions and need to be maintained by the local jurisdictions.