BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 1215
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Date of Hearing: May 13, 2015
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Jimmy Gomez, Chair
AB
1215 (Ting) - As Amended March 26, 2015
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|Policy |Accountability and |Vote:|9 - 0 |
|Committee: |Administrative Review | | |
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| |Privacy and Consumer | |11 - 0 |
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Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program: NoReimbursable: No
SUMMARY:
This bill creates the California Open Data Act and the position
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of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) to be appointed by the Governor.
The CDO is required to work with state agencies and experts to
create a California Open Data Standard (CODS) and a centralized
Internet Web portal for the public to access public data from
state agencies. Specifically, this bill:
1)Defines "public data" as all data collected by a state agency
that is subject to disclosure under the California Public
Records Act (PRA).
2)Creates a CDO, appointed by the Governor and serving under the
Secretary of the Government Operations Agency, and requires
the CDO to:
a) Inventory all available public data in the state;
b) Establish the CODS;
c) Publish, by March 1, 2016, a technical standards manual
for state agencies; and
d) Establish, by July 1, 2016, a Data Working Group
comprised of a data coordinator from each major state
agency and two open data experts.
3)Specifies the CODS requirements regarding format, updates,
availability of data, and search technologies, and specifies
the legal policies regarding the data.
4)Requires each state agency to a) submit to the CDO, by July 1,
2016, a strategic plan and a strategic enterprise application
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plan; b) release data to the public via the centralized
Internet web portal; and c) report to the CDO if the agency is
unable to make data available, stating the reasons it is
unable to do so.
5)Permits local governments to adopt the CODS.
FISCAL EFFECT:
1)Unknown costs, likely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,
to the Government Operations Agency to create a CDO, and to
provide staff sufficient to carry out the required duties of a
statewide data inventory, establishing a CODS, developing and
publishing a technical manual, establishing a working group
within the timeframe allowed in the bill.
2)Unknown, but significant costs, likely in the millions of
dollars statewide, to state agencies to collaborate with the
statewide data portal and to review and inventory public data.
For example, the California Department of Insurance estimates
it would cost them $199,000 in FY 2015-16, $377,000 in
2016-17, and $180,000 ongoing to interact with the Internet
Web portal and to inventory the Department's data and redact
non-public information.
3)State agency costs may be partially offset in future years to
the extent there is a decrease in PRA requests.
COMMENTS:
1)Purpose. This bill is intended to increase government
transparency by expanding public access to state agency
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records and databases, to the extent such records and data are
already required to be open to the public under the Public
Records Act (PRA). The bill requires state agencies to make
public data available in electronic formats that are easy to
access, download, analyze and interpret. According to the
author, "Access to public records is a cumbersome process for
people and organizations that use them. Many times requests
are granted with paper or PDF versions of data that is not
easily used or analyzed. The intent of public records is not
to create a more difficult process by having unusable data,
but to increase access for public consumption."
2)Background. California has a centralized data portal at
Data.CA.gov. The portal contains state government data in raw,
machine-readable formats that can be reformatted and reused in
different ways. According to the Data.CA.gov website, more
than 100 million data records are available through the portal
including: vital statistics such as population, birth, death,
and marriage data; more than 50 million data records on
education; California port import/export data; state highway
traffic data; data on vehicle accidents, fatalities, and
injuries; tourism data; water resource data; and geospatial
data. And in 2010, Data.CA.gov launched a search function for
several of the datasets, charts, and graphs. The Data.CA.gov
datasets are available in variety of open formats including
CSV, XLS, KML, TXT, and XML.
The California Health and Human Services Agency and the State
Controller's Office have been leaders among state agencies in
the effort to move toward open data standards for public data.
This bill seeks to require all state agencies to provide
centralized access to all public data in an open data format.
3)Related Legislation.
a) SB 573 (Pan), pending in the Senate Appropriations
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Committee, creates a CDO in state government and
establishes a statewide open data portal to provide public
access to date sets from agencies within the state.
b) AB 169 (Maienschein), pending referral in the Senate,
would require a local agency, except a school district,
that voluntarily posts a public record that is described as
"open" on its Internet website to post the public record in
an open format, as defined.
c) SB 272 (Hertzberg), pending referral in the Assembly,
would require a local agency to create a catalog of
"enterprise systems" utilized by the agency, make the
catalog available to the public upon request in the
agency's offices, and to post the catalog on the agency's
website.
1)Prior Legislation. SB 1002 (Yee) of 2012 would have required
the State Chief Information Officer to conduct a study to
determine the feasibility of providing electronic records in a
open format. SB 1002 was vetoed by the Governor.
Analysis Prepared by:Jennifer Swenson / APPR. / (916)
319-2081
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