Out of Date senators/reps

[jwass]

The house and senate polygon files have information on the senators/representatives of each district, which are included from the original MassGIS shapefiles. Since the time the shapefiles were created, some seats that were open that are now filled, some people have left office and others are in. There are also some legislator URLs that are just wrong.

Is your vision for this repo to be a one to one match of the MassGIS published data or do you want the files contain up-to-date info with the current sitting representatives in the data?

[calvinmetcalf]

the data on the website is from 5/29/2013 is that the one that's out of date your talking about ?

[jwass]

I looked into this a little bit more. A couple of things are going on.

• The repo's current HOUSE2012_POLY.geojson was generated from an older shapefile than what's currently posted on MassGIS here:
  http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/it-serv-and-support/application-serv/office-of-geographic-information-massgis/datalayers/house2012.html.
• The MassGIS shapefile contains out-of-date information.

Using 8th Suffolk district as an example. The repo's current file lists the rep as Martha Walz. MassGIS's shapefile (updated 5/2103) lists it as open. Jay Livingstone now represents that district.

[calvinmetcalf]

This is a recurring problem with MassGIS my inclination is to just have this synced with massgis, though since I have to keep an updated layer for something else anyway I might make a separate repo with the rep districts.

[jwass]

Sounds good. Definitely a better idea to stay synced with MassGIS especially given the rest of the repo, but figured I'd ask. I'll send a pull request just to bring the house data up to the current shapefile.

And we should get on someone's case at MassGIS to get their data correct.

[calvinmetcalf]

I'll make the new repo tomorrow populate it tomorrow when I update these for work

[calvinmetcalf]

https://github.com/calvinmetcalf/MA-Legislators