[Talk-us-massachusetts] Towns' borders along rivers

[Greg Troxel]

"Wayne Emerson, Jr. via Talk-us-massachusetts"
<talk-us-massachusetts at openstreetmap.org> writes:

> On 5/29/2020 10:40 AM, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> I think this needs research into authoriative evidence before doing it.
>> Absent that, I think our borders should follow the "towns survey" point
>> layer from massgis.
>
> After the latest MassGIS community boundaries were released last
> Sept., I began to use this dataset to slowly upgrade the townlines for
> the entire state, one line at a time, using JOSM's plugin to "replace
> geometry." I finally finished this task this morning. This same
> morning Yuri Yatsynovich has begun deleting & replacing, or altering
> the course of many town and county borders that fall on rivers. There
> was no consensus for this.

I think what you are doing about MassGIS data is the right thing.

Yuri: it seems clear that there is no consensus to do what you are
doing.  From the comments on the list, and also my historical
impressions of views, you are the only one who thinks what you are doing
is ok.  In my view, doing this unilaterally borders on vandalism.
Please stop.


There's another issue about rivers as boundaries.  Just because a
statute says that a river centerline (which in MA seems to be the
midpoint of the banks when the water is at normal levels - this
definition varies from state to state), doesn't mean that if some mapper
looks at aerial imagery and moves the centerline to look better that
this is a good place to put the boundary.  It seems obvious from having
dealt with these issues that the process of deciding on a town boundary
from river changes is complicated, and reasonable to assume it involves
some combination of a surveyor or other such licensed professional as
well as agreement of the selectboards of the two towns, and that the
results of any such discussion/agreement would be documented by
coordinates.  And then, the MassGIS towns layer would be updated.

Which is a long way of saying that the town boundary representation in
OSM should be what's in the MassGIS database, absent a particular reason
with detailed rationale, probably backed up by discussion with both town
governments.