Crowd-sourcing Ohio's new 'land rush'

By Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray’s count, the State of Ohio owns 53,010 parcels of land, from tiny, odd-shaped fragments to large parcels in the hundreds-of-acres range. The problem is, no comprehensive inventory of these parcels exists. With many of them, it is not clear who exactly holds the titles and how they are being used. This means the land is often under-utilized or improperly used and may be contributing to blight, which costs us all in potential economic benefit and quality of life.

Enter, as it so often does these days, the Web. Cordray has taken the inventive step of listing all those known parcels on his department's Web site for Ohioans to peruse, sorting by county and size. He says the idea is to “empower Ohio citizens” to investigate the properties, check other sources such as county auditors’ offices, and report on their status by clicking on their entries online. Cordray is inviting the public to offer ideas on how to identify and use these properties.

The state will use the information to determine whether the pieces of land should be used for commercial development, annexed to adjoining properties, reclaimed for public use or simply sold. Once that’s decided, an interested citizen may even be able to purchase a property from the state.

The idea of using the Web to gather information from a large group of people isn’t new. It’s been called “crowd-sourcing” in the computer business, with firms such as Procter & Gamble, and more recently by the newspaper industry – an effective tool when an organization doesn’t have the resources to do the exhaustive research/data-crunching itself.

In Ohio’s case, it is vastly more efficient and less costly than a “top-down,” government-staffed inventory of lands that could wind up as a taxpayer-gouging, bureaucratic mess. Consider how big a chore is involved: Hamilton County alone has 3,120 listings. Cordray’s Web-based inventory is a smart use of government’s online resources, and it increases Ohioans’ access to public information to boot.