Re: Data needed....

Usually ILECs and CLECs report subscriber lines at least annually to the Regulatory Commission for the State you need data for. 

Much appreciation for this blog. Truly fascinating and professionally written post. I would like to find more in the near future.

I have been working on emergency management in my country - Italy -. I am not a technician, geologist or engineer, but I deal with content for the web, communications. As a I have a background as a researcher I know that data are crucial, as they allow to take better decision.
What I realized is that it could be so incredibly difficult to gather and collect data such as: forestfires, floodings, ...., structures. One exception: earthquakes, thanks to the great job of INGV (National Institute http://www.ingv.it/eng/the-ingv/). Why? Some of them are not public, some others are in pdf documents, or in no-sharable formats.
So I started to think to find a solution as, in my opinion, building a more resilient society, as European Union affirms, means to allow the public to know and analyse all these data. The public means: citizens, volunteers association, media. During an emergency event, as I experienced during the last earthquake in my country, to have data and to have not can make the difference.
I approached the crowdsourcing, with one experimental project as I thought it is a powerful tool. But, although there are best practices all over the world, it is perceived with a sort of suspicious from both sides (the crowd and the institutional bodies). Moreover crowdsourcing needs to be proactive and committed, and this is a true challenge.
At the same time I am trying to gather and geolocate data using RSS feeds from several agencies, although some rss are not in the right format, it is an interesting and powerful experiment set up thanks to "managing news" a drupal based tool developed by Development Seed.
RSS is a very interesting format to automatically gather data that can be aggregated and commented, and at the same time the source is clear and transparent.

Paulette and Pam--excellent, and thanks. Will post here and get back to you right away.

I am trying to find data on the number of land line phones in a give geographic area in my county. Is there anywhere that I can find this information?

We use the available wetland and floodplain data all the time. It would be great to have the LUST locations too, but I realize these are probably maintained at the state level. I would also be interested in seeing EPA/DOT permits in a geospatial database. Also, I cannot seem to find the FAU route information anywhere online to get the route designations.