If one of the strengths of the Richland County experience is having a single office to deal with all spatial data and technologies, including remote sensing, one of the issues that must be dealt with in the county is the division of labor among users of remote sensing data. County planners, public works engineers, economic development experts, and state officials who work with the county are all potential users of remote sensing data, but few of them have the background to understand when and where remote sensing can be applied in their own work. Without an understanding of the potential utility of remote sensing, they cannot know the potential benefits of the data for certain tasks or demonstrate them to others. Even remote sensing enthusiasts in local government admit there is a certain inertia in some sectors of their organizations such as permitting and land management. These sectors remain uninterested in remote sensing applications because traditional practices are effective and not easily replaced. In Richland County, the emphasis was on developing remote sensing applications for those areas where remote sensing could make an immediate contribution, not on serving all sectors of local government simultaneously.

For Richland County, as for many urban counties and cities, the valuable high-resolution data from commercial satellites are often too expensive for local governments to consider, particularly when the purchase of data is just one of the expenses associated with building a remote sensing and GIS capacity. Other expenses are for hardware, software, permanent staff, and training. In the past, local governments periodically spent large amounts for airborne data or surveying, which fitted into the experience of financial officers better than expenditures for a new technology that initially appears to be largely visual. The capacity to demonstrate financial and operational benefits—that is, savings of both money and time—was seen by workshop participants from Richland County and other local governments as essential to the successful introduction of remote sensing into local government. As state and local government revenues decline in the midst of a slow economic recovery on the national level, many workshop participants reported that public sector budgets are under strong pressures to constrain expenditures. As a result, cost savings will be a critical component of any new public sector remote sensing activities.

A related problem that arose in Richland County is how current commercial licensing practices can limit local government uses of commercial remote sensing data. Financial need leads many public sector agencies to seek ways of sharing the cost of new data across a number of agencies, so that the data are often used and reused for multiple purposes. This type of data sharing across agencies and government units can be limited by licensing restrictions if the data originate in the private sector, as do many of the high-resolution data sets for urban and suburban uses.

Another problem related to licensing came up in the discussion of the