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HELP
SAVE CERES!!!
The
California Environmental
Resources Evaluation System (CERES)*
is in danger of being eliminated from the 2004 State budget. Two
legislative hearings have been scheduled to discuss cutting the
$750,000 CERES operating budget:
As
part of BAAMA's mission "to be the primary forum of the San
Francisco Bay Region geospatial community", BAAMA urges its
members to pitch in and HELP SAVE CERES from the CHOPPING BLOCK!!!
The elimination of CERES would bring an end to the invaluable California
Environmental Information Catalog (CEIC), a statewide metadata
catalog for reporting and discovery of information resources for
California. Eliminating CERES is a huge price to pay for reducing
the state's $34.6 billion deficit by only $750,000 (0.002%).
You
can help!!! A sample letter is
provided below that you can cut-and-paste into an e-mail
message and send to members of the State Assembly
and Senate Budget Subcommittees (see e-mail addresses below).
Please take the time to customize the letter to describe how this
vital resource has helped your organization save money and made
your land use planning, environmental protection, resource management
and other operations more effective.
*
CERES is an information system developed by the California
Resources Agency to facilitate access to a variety of electronic
data describing California's rich and diverse environments. The
goal of CERES is to improve environmental analysis and planning
by integrating natural and cultural resource information from multiple
contributors and by making it available and useful to a wide variety
of users.
Sample
Letter - please customize this for your organization before sending
it to members of the State Assembly and Senate
Budget Subcommittees
We
urge you to support the CERES program, an information system developed
by the Resources Agency to facilitate access to electronic data
describing California's rich and diverse environments. CERES role
as a clearinghouse for these data is invaluable and unique in State
government. The CERES metadata catalog and spatial data repository
is widely used by government decision-makers, non-governmental entities,
educational institutions and others for conservation and environmental
planning, assessment, management and research. Roughly 7,000 users
download more than 35 gigabytes of information every day from CERES.
This is equivalent to retrieving 50 copies of the electronic version
of the 2002 Encyclopedia Britannica on a daily basis.
CERES
is the only entity that catalogues data and land use planning information,
which reduces billable time spent looking for, and retrieving, data
for planning analyses, such as revisions to General Plans. This
reduces costs to local governments and the public.
The
leadership role CERES has taken in coordinating GIS activities at
all levels of government, local, state and federal, is also of critical
importance. CERES's identification of cost and data sharing opportunities
saves time and money for government agencies, nonprofit organizations
and commercial firms.
A large
number of person-years' worth of work has gone into developing and
maintaining the CERES metadata catalog, including the active participation
of over 100 local governments in the Bay Area that recently entered
their metadata into the catalog. To cut this program would undo
a tremendous amount of effort, and severely damage the State's credibility
for building a similar system at some point in the future.
For
these reasons, we urge you to fund CERES as stated in the Governor's
Budget.
Sincerely,
State
Assembly Budget Subcommittee #3:
State
Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee #2:
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