[Tagging] fire district boundaries

[Colin Smale]

I wouldn't use boundary=admin with admin_level unless there is actually a
hierarchical relationship with the levels above/below. Otherwise they
should really be in their own hierarchy, using something like
boundary=fire_service. AIUI the US fire departments are at the city or
county level. Can a city/county have more than one FD within its borders?
Can an FD's jurisdiction extend across local government boundaries?

The points I'm trying to make are that:
1) a fire district is not a unit of local government, so it doesn't fit
naturally with boundary=admin
2) the use of admin_level (the "level" bit) implies a hierarchy which may
not be the case. The basic hierarchy is that the US consists of States
which consist of Counties which have Cities (yes I know it's more
complicated than that in practice). A City may have fire districts, but it
may also have suburbs, police precincts etc which have little or no
relationship to each other in terms of boundaries, although they are all
subsets of the enclosing City. Perhaps all of these should be the same
admin_level, one level below the city, with some distinguishing tag to
separate police areas from fire etc.

Excuse me if I have misunderstood (I am not an American) but I am just
trying to keep different concepts separate, avoiding reuse of tags for
conceptually different things because it seems "easy".

Colin


> admin boundary levels 9 & 10 are unused in the US.
>
> i see some usage of level 9 for fire district boundaries in the US.
>
> opinions?
>
> thanks,
>     richard
>
>
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