California Overlapping Cities And Counties And Identifiers

WARNING : This is a pre-release dataset and its fields names and data structures are subject to change. It should be considered pre-release until the end of 2024. Expected changes:

• Metadata is missing or incomplete for some layers at this time and will be continuously improved.

• We expect to update this layer roughly in line with CDTFA at some point, but will increase the update cadence over time as we are able to automate the final pieces of the process.

This dataset is continuously updated as the source data from CDTFA is updated, as often as many times a month. If you require unchanging point-in-time data, export a copy for your own use rather than using the service directly in your applications.

Purpose

County and incorporated place (city) boundaries along with third party identifiers used to join in external data. Boundaries are from the authoritative source the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA), altered to show the counties as one polygon. This layer displays the city polygons on top of the County polygons so the area isn"t interrupted. The GEOID attribute information is added from the US Census. GEOID is based on merged State and County FIPS codes for the Counties. Abbreviations for Counties and Cities were added from Caltrans Division of Local Assistance (DLA) data. Place Type was populated with information extracted from the Census. Names and IDs from the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN), the authoritative source of place names as published in the Geographic Name Information System (GNIS), are attached as well. Finally, coastal buffers are removed, leaving the land-based portions of jurisdictions. This feature layer is for public use.

Related Layers

This dataset is part of a grouping of many datasets:

1. Cities : Only the city boundaries and attributes, without any unincorporated areas

   • With Coastal Buffers
   • Without Coastal Buffers

2. Counties : Full county boundaries and attributes, including all cities within as a single polygon

   • With Coastal Buffers
   • Without Coastal Buffers

3. Cities and Full Counties : A merge of the other two layers, so polygons overlap within city boundaries. Some customers require this behavior, so we provide it as a separate service**.**

   • With Coastal Buffers
   • Without Coastal Buffers (this dataset)

4. Place Abbreviations

5. Unincorporated Areas (Coming Soon)

6. Census Designated Places (Coming Soon)

7. Cartographic Coastline

   • Polygon
   • Line source (Coming Soon)

Working with Coastal Buffers

The dataset you are currently viewing includes the coastal buffers for cities and counties that have them in the authoritative source data from CDTFA. In the versions where they are included, they remain as a second polygon on cities or counties that have them, with all the same identifiers, and a value in the COASTAL field indicating if it"s an ocean or a bay buffer. If you wish to have a single polygon per jurisdiction that includes the coastal buffers, you can run a Dissolve on the version that has the coastal buffers on all the fields except COASTAL, Area_SqMi, Shape_Area, and Shape_Length to get a version with the correct identifiers.

Point of Contact

California Department of Technology, Office of Digital Services, odsdataservices@state.ca.gov

Field and Abbreviation Definitions

• COPRI : county number followed by the 3-digit city primary number used in the Board of Equalization"s 6-digit tax rate area numbering system
• Place Name : CDTFA incorporated (city) or county name
• County : CDTFA county name. For counties, this will be the name of the polygon itself. For cities, it is the name of the county the city polygon is within.
• Legal Place Name : Board on Geographic Names authorized nomenclature for area names published in the Geographic Name Information System
• GNIS_ID: The numeric identifier from the Board on Geographic Names that can be used to join these boundaries to other datasets utilizing this identifier.
• GEOID : numeric geographic identifiers from the US Census Bureau Place Type: Board on Geographic Names authorized nomenclature for boundary type published in the Geographic Name Information System
• Place Abbr : CalTrans Division of Local Assistance abbreviations of incorporated area names
• CNTY Abbr : CalTrans Division of Local Assistance abbreviations of county names
• Area_SqMi : The area of the administrative unit (city or county) in square miles, calculated in EPSG 3310 California Teale Albers.
• COASTAL : Indicates if the polygon is a coastal buffer. Null for land polygons. Additional values include "ocean" and "bay".
• GlobalID : While all of the layers we provide in this dataset include a GlobalID field with unique values, we do not recommend you make any use of it. The GlobalID field exists to support offline sync, but is not persistent, so data keyed to it will be orphaned at our next update. Use one of the other persistent identifiers, such as GNIS_ID or GEOID instead.

Accuracy

CDTFA"s source data notes the following about accuracy:

City boundary changes and county boundary line adjustments filed with the Board of Equalization per Government Code 54900. This GIS layer contains the boundaries of the unincorporated county and incorporated cities within the state of California. The initial dataset was created in March of 2015 and was based on the State Board of Equalization tax rate area boundaries. As of April 1, 2024, the maintenance of this dataset is provided by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration for the purpose of determining sales and use tax rates. The boundaries are continuously being revised to align with aerial imagery when areas of conflict are discovered between the original boundary provided by the California State Board of Equalization and the boundary made publicly available by local, state, and federal government. Some differences may occur between actual recorded boundaries and the boundaries used for sales and use tax purposes. The boundaries in this map are representations of taxing jurisdictions for the purpose of determining sales and use tax rates and should not be used to determine precise city or county boundary line locations. COUNTY = county name; CITY = city name or unincorporated territory; COPRI = county number followed by the 3-digit city primary number used in the California State Board of Equalization"s 6-digit tax rate area numbering system (for the purpose of this map, unincorporated areas are assigned 000 to indicate that the area is not within a city).

Boundary Processing

These data make a structural change from the source data. While the full boundaries provided by CDTFA include coastal buffers of varying sizes, many users need boundaries to end at the shoreline of the ocean or a bay. As a result, after examining existing city and county boundary layers, these datasets provide a coastline cut generally along the ocean facing coastline. For county boundaries in northern California, the cut runs near the Golden Gate Bridge, while for cities, we cut along the bay shoreline and into the edge of the Delta at the boundaries of Solano, Contra Costa, and Sacramento counties.

In the services linked above, the versions that include the coastal buffers contain them as a second (or third) polygon for the city or county, with the value in the COASTAL field set to whether it"s a bay or ocean polygon. These can be processed back into a single polygon by dissolving on all the fields you wish to keep, since the attributes, other than the COASTAL field and geometry attributes (like areas) remain the same between the polygons for this purpose.

Slivers

In cases where a city or county"s boundary ends near a coastline, our coastline data may cross back and forth many times while roughly paralleling the jurisdiction"s boundary, resulting in many polygon slivers. We post-process the data to remove these slivers using a city/county boundary priority algorithm. That is, when the data run parallel to each other, we discard the coastline cut and keep the CDTFA-provided boundary, even if it extends into the ocean a small amount. This processing supports consistent boundaries for Fort Bragg, Point Arena, San Francisco, Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, and Capitola, in addition to others. More information on this algorithm will be provided soon.

Coastline Caveats

Some cities have buffers extending into water bodies that we do not cut at the shoreline. These include South Lake Tahoe and Folsom, which extend into neighboring lakes, and San Diego and surrounding cities that extend into San Diego Bay, which our shoreline encloses. If you have feedback on the exclusion of these items, or others, from the shoreline cuts, please reach out using the contact information above.

Offline Use

This service is fully enabled for sync and export using Esri Field Maps or other similar tools. Importantly, the GlobalID field exists only to support that use case and should not be used for any other purpose (see note in field descriptions).

Updates and Date of Processing

Concurrent with CDTFA updates, approximately every two weeks, Last Processed: 12/17/2024 by Nick Santos using code path at https://github.com/CDT-ODS-DevSecOps/cdt-ods-gis-city-county/ at commit 0bf269d24464c14c9cf4f7dea876aa562984db63. It incorporates updates from CDTFA as of 12/12/2024. Future updates will include improvements to metadata and update frequency.
Organization: State of California
Last updated: 2025-07-23T21:03:11.857696
Tags: boundaries, california-department-of-technology, cities, counties