www.loubar.org 16 Louisville Bar Briefs PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE Where Do I Live, Again?: Finding Kentucky Geographic Information Kurt Metzmeier Recently, local election officials sent letters to residents of the Willow Creek subdivision informing them that the state mapping software had located their homes in Jefferson County, not Oldham County, where it appears from news stories the deeds to their properties were registered. The residents had been paying taxes, voting and sending their kids to Oldham County schools for decades. A story in the Courier-Journal noted that while the underly- ing property lines had not changed, the state Board of Elec- tions had recently aligned its precinct maps with the state geographic information database, an action which revealed the discrepancy. There are indications that some officials knew that some deeds along the Jefferson-Oldham border were registered in the wrong county. Jefferson Property Valuation Administrator Colleen Younger said that such conflicts had in the past been resolved with “handshake agreements.” Jefferson County Clerk David Yates has al- ready filed a declaratory action to get the courts involved in resolving this mess as orderly as possible. Interestingly, this will not be the first time the Jefferson- Oldham line has led to a dispute. In 1873, local landowner Phillip R. Taylor petitioned the legislature to move the portion of his sizable estate in Jefferson County to Old- ham County. The legislature granted his request, creating the Oldham County Notch. No one knows exactly why the legislature agreed, but the possibility of corruption in such laws is why the 1890-91 Constitutional Convention barred local and special legislation in § 59 and § 60 of the Kentucky constitution. Since the foundation of the United States, Americans have surveyed and recorded deeds to their properties in the county where they resided. However, until recently, those property surveys, as well as county boundary lines, were the product of human surveyors drawing lines on sturdy paper. Only in the late 20th century, when satellites began surveying the globe, computers became affordable and the internet made information readily accessible, did human maps give way to geographic information systems (GIS). The Census Bureau’s TIGER The federal government had long made street-level maps—a necessity for the thousands of workers it sent out to col- lect census data. In 1990, the United States Census Bureau debuted the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER), a computer-based geographic information system created to assist census takers in find- ing the houses they needed to enumerate. It includes roads, highways, city limits, rivers and census tracts. However, the government did not keep this information to itself; the TIGER database of coordinates has been available freely to mapmakers for years. However, when combined with Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite data that became publicly available in the late 1990s, it became the basis for everything from MapQuest to the state GIS sys- tems involved in this controversy. “TIGER helped grow an entire industry — the GIS industry — and created many good jobs by providing popular map- ping products integral to the everyday lives of Americans,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said while commemorating its 25th anniversary last year. Kentucky State Resources As referenced earlier, in 2022 the Kentucky General As- sembly passed KRS 42.655, which mandates that “the (Continued on next page) ©2025 Lenihan Real Estate, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Sotheby’s International Realty® and the Sotheby’s International Realty Logo are service marks licensed to Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates LLC and used with permission. Lenihan Real Estate, LLC fully supports the principles of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Each franchise is independently owned and operated. Any services or products provided by independently owned and operated franchisees are not provided by, affiliated with or related to Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates LLC nor any of its affiliated companies. Laura Rice & Associates 502.595.8450 [email protected] lauramovesyou.com SCAN FOR LISTINGS Raising the Bar in Real Estate Performance. Excellence You Can See. Results You Can Feel. “ It goes to show how important, emotionally and in real estate law, a county line on a map can be.