The State of Colorado active local governments page is an alphabetical list of all 3000 Colorado counties, municipalities, special assessment districts, school districts and property tax entities. Bookmark the list of links to the home Web pages for Colorado counties and cities.

Sometimes seeing the visual relationship of the counties on a map is helpful, and even better when the county image links directly to the home Web page.

State archives are wonderful repositories for documents that aren’t available at other state or county agencies. Like many of the state archives, Colorado has put an index of its holdings online. The Colorado archive also has searchable indexes to historical military, marriage, divorce, probate and census records. Each result list for the particular type of records returns a name and date. Search by partial name through all of the indexes to develop a list of the records where your search terms appear. You can email this list to the Archive to get a quote on the cost for them to retrieve and copy those records.

Unfortunately, the business entity search at the Secretary of State is too restrictive in the search fields, limited to company or Agent name. But the search results are more extensive, linking to document images corresponding to the type of filing. After a free registration, search the UCC filings by partial individual or company name. The free service does not include document images but it does return the date and type of filing, the debtor names, the secured party and the collateral description.

The Colorado Attorney General doesn’t have a database search for AG opinions. But Google can help! To find the appearance of, for example, the word “conservation” in any AG opinions go to your Google search box and enter your query like this:

conservation site:www.ago.state.co.us/agopinions/

This is the results page.

The AG also links to professional license name searches. You can even download records for all licensees by profession.

Search across all professional licensing boards regulated by the Colorado Division of Registrations by licensed individual. The site warns, “While most of the professions and occupations are licensed, others may be registered, certified, or listed. For precise terminology and requirements related to a profession or occupation, please consult the website of the appropriate board or program.”

If you must, view the names, town and (sometimes) photo of the state lottery winners in 2006 and 2007.

Today’s county award goes to Jefferson County. Search for an address by street number only, which returns a list of all addresses with that number. Link to property details, ownership history, parcel mapping and sales information on neighboring properties.

This is the sort of topic that those of us in a fairly offbeat line of work, with a twisted sense of the world -which pretty universally applies to private investigators- can appreciate and put to practical use. Let’s start with terrorism, shall we?

The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), “a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing terrorism on U.S. soil or mitigating its effects”, maps real-time global terrorist threats and events. MIPT also has resources on terrorism-related court cases and terrorist groups and leaders. See all types of worldwide calamities, suspicious activities and threats on the Global Incident Map.

Global health outbreaks, derived from multiple sources, are tracked on HEALTHMap, a project of John Brownstein, Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Clark Freifeld, Research Software Developer at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. View by disease type, country and recent incidents.

Incident1 is a start-up emergency incidents and crime mapping site. Drawn from law enforcement and highway patrol sources, it aims to be national but is currently limited to a few regions. Search by zip code or the drop-down menu of regions to see recent crime and accidents. IncidentLog covers many local crime, traffic and fire events that aren’t at Incident1. Plot events by type and/or region, state, city or street. IncidentLog also has a running list of the events by selected criteria and provides a link to the source Web site.

A collection of federal agencies collaborated on the live mapping of wildfires, which lists date the fire started and the number of acres involved, as well as a link to the source agency. View fire locations back to 2002. The USDA Forest Service active fires map shows the location of large fires in the US and Canada but seems to have data that is a subset of the wildfires map. Other maps of active fires are found at Geodata.gov.

The new Google My Maps feature enables anyone to easily configure a map with selective features. Google Maps Mania discovered this Google My Maps creation of wildfires in Waycross, Georgia.

Locate recent earthquakes, active volcanoes and tropical storms on the Asia Pacific Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities Atlas.

Volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, floods, power outages, epidemics and other unpleasant occurrences are noted on this global map provided by the National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, Emergency and Disaster Information Services (EDIS), Budapest Hungary. Scroll beyond the map image for a list of events by date and time.

The National Hurricane Center has lots of live maps of weather patterns.

The International Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Crime Services has a news service of piracy alerts and maps global piracy events. Additional maritime incident data can be gathered from the International Maritime Organization, which provides detailed incident descriptions with free registration.

Even a map of wars and violent conflicts doesn’t cover all disaster events but I wanted to leave room for you to add your own resources!

The North Carolina Sex Offender Registry has added email notification and mapping. Search by partial name, city, county, address or physical coordinates to retrieve a list of offenders. Select a profile, then click on the mapping symbol. Expand the view to include registrants within a 1, 3 or 5 mile radius. Hover over the icon to view the other nearby registrants’ photos and addresses. Then request email notification whenever a sex offender is registered at an address within that radius. The search function also covers sex offenders who are incarcerated.

Montana driving record histories and vehicle license information can now be obtained from the State of Montana Web site. Both are only available with with an account, subject to a permissible reason, outlined in the subscriber agreement.

…Personal Information may be requested as a part of Agreed Data only for the following purposes:
A. By any insurer or insurance support organization in connection with claims
investigation activities, anti-fraud activities, rating, or underwriting.
B. In the normal course of business by a legitimate business or its agents,
employees or contractors:
1. To verify the accuracy of personal information submitted by the individual
who is the subject of the record to the business or its agents, employees
or contractors; and
2. If such information is not correct, to obtain the correct information, but only for the purposes of preventing fraud by pursuing legal remedies against, or recovering on a debt or security interest against an insured or applicant.
3. To verify vehicle information.
C. By an employer or its agent or insurer to obtain or verify information relating to a holder of a commercial driver’s license required under the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986 (49 U.S.C. Part 383)
D. For use in connection with any civil, criminal, administrative, or arbitral
proceeding in any Federal, State, or local court or agency or before any selfregulatory
body, including the service of process…

[Via TVC]

Booking photos of those who are arrested but not charged or found not guilty must be removed from Web sites maintained by county Sheriff offices, according to an opinion issued by the Alabama Attorney General.

Plot parcels and geographic features on the Tucson Arizona Department of Transportation GIS parcel viewer. Search by address, real property owner name, name of school or intersection. Mastering the map functions can take some time if you’re not versed in the Autodesk program (which requires the Internet Explorer browser), so you might want to consult their map viewer guide. The easiest way to plot a parcel is to search by the owner name, address or parcel number from this page. Then select the link, “zoom to parcel”, which highlights the parcel on the map. Select “detail information” to link directly to permit history for that parcel and recorded documents.

Print and save maps with the features you specify. The Tucson Department of Transportation also produces other maps related to traffic and geographic land characteristics.

Find short definitions for real estate terms by first letter and additional ones in this mortgage dictionary. The National Association of Real Estate Investment Managers compiled a more extensive real estate investment glossary.

Search a real estate and mortgage glossary in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or German, or translate the English language real estate terminology and definitions into any of those languages. Explore the language of commercial real estate in this document prepared by the National Association of Realtors.

Links to dictionaries and thesauri for dozens of different categories are maintained by the University of Wisconsin.

Bookmark the Louisiana State University Business Subject Guides for resources related to real estate, finance, insurance and general business.

The Department of Justice lists clemency recipients from 1989 to 2001. Name, type of relief, year sentenced and offense are included, and for some years, the federal district in which the charges were filed.

The Alabama Board of Pardons and Parole lists names of inmates with upcoming parole or pardon hearings. Idaho Commission Of Pardons and Parole has a month-by-month record of hearings and decisions since 1999 with the inmate name and Department of Corrections ID number. The decisions record also notes reasons for the action taken. Montana has dispositions from 1999.

Nevada posts a PDF of inmates under parole consideration.

Some other parole boards are listed here and here.
State archives maintain older records of paroles and pardons.

A complaint about Social Security numbers exposed on a federal government contract and grants awards online database has lead to their removal from the Census database and from FedSpending.org, OMB Watch, which operates the database of financial awards, has removed the ID number field, which listed some Social Security numbers.

At the request of the government, OMB Watch is willing to temporarily redact the Federal Award ID data field for the entire FAADS database if the government agrees to provide a plan for updating the unique identifier without personally identifiable information within 30 days.

As reported:

Federal Database Exposes Social Security Numbers, New York Times.

Agencies expose 100,000 Social Security numbers on Web, Government Executive.

The Sunlight Foundation background on the OMB Watch, New York Times and federal agencies exchanges is well worth a read.

The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department crime mapping program plots crime incidents that have occurred over the previous 3 months. Search by type of crime, address, landmark and within a radius to get reported crimes plotted on a map. Label and print a color PDF map with icons designating type of crime and location.

The Coral Gables Police Department has a searchable database of vehicle accident reports and incident reports. Search accident, arrest or incident events by location, name, report number or date. A sortable list is returned with date, type of contact, location and whether an report image is available. Report images are available for accidents and incidents but not arrests. But arrests at a particular location may have been proceeded by an incident involving the same subject, for which a report image would be online. Name of contacted individuals are listed. See image example.

Philadelphia will be the first region in Pennsylvania to implement an automated inmate release telephone notification. The service, which just covers local jails, will be available to anyone, not just crime victims, when it goes into operation in June 2007. The Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification (SAVIN) alert program will add the other counties over the next 18 months, and may later add state inmates.

The Houston Independent School District is the most recent Texas school district to post its payments to vendors online. Expenses can be identified by vendor but not by type of expenditure. Other districts have some payment information online as well.

A law under consideration in the Nevada legislature would prevent sealing of court cases involving high-profile litigants, which the judges had been doing, according to a survey by the Nevada Appeal.

There are many commercial services that offer a free FEIN (Federal Employer Identification Number) search by company name across multiple states simultaneously. All return different results and amount of detail. Below are screenshots of a company name search in 3 different FEIN services. You can also view the results at this page.

The free portion of the service FEINSearch returns a list of companies with the corresponding city and state. The results list of companies on KnowX also only shows city and state but the list is longer than the FEINSearch, possibly because of redundancy. A search by name on freeERISA provides the FEIN, company address and phone number, whether the address is current and the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code number. Registration entitles you to 3 free searches. The freeERISA site elucidates the sources for the FEIN material, which is helpful for understanding the limitations of the database and why all FEINs aren’t listed.