[Talk-us-massachusetts] Talk-us-massachusetts Digest, Vol 44, Issue 1

[Greg Troxel]

Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:

> Sorry, Greg, I could have explained in more clearly.
> Here is an example of a border between Newton and Watertown:
> The way (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142866017) is the border between
> Newton and Watertown and this way is, essentially, a duplicate of the
> Charles River stream. Wikipedia says "From Watertown to Waltham to Needham
> and Dedham <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedham,_Massachusetts>, Newton is
> bounded by the Charles River <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_River>."

wikipedia is not authoritative.   town boundaries are as I understand it
defined by statute.

> (this is also confirmed by town's GIS maps, but it would be great if anyone
> could direct me to a formal document that says something like "the border
> between Newton and Watertown goes along the middle of the Charles River")
> -- so, almost certainly, the river itself is the border and if its stream
> changes so does the border. Thus, I suggest excluding the way (
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142866017) from the border relations for
> Newton and Watertown and including the corresponding part of the Charles
> River instead. This will help to solve, besides removing duplicate ways,
> the above mentioned problem of when the stream changes, so should the
> border as well.

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.

https://docs.digital.mass.gov/dataset/massgis-data-community-boundaries-towns-survey-points

This layer talks about being derived from statute and also gives
references to  atlases of boundaries.

One of my friends is knowledgeable about this sort of thing and I will
ask about this border and statute.