Just to play devil's advocate, if the county builds a stadium for the local high school team, are citizen's entitled to free admission?
If they build a performing arts center, are citizens entitled to use it for free?
The marginal cost to produce data (or software) is almost nil -- hence the price should go to nil as well. THe only reason for a society to force the cost to be non-zero via licensing is to incentivize the creation of the data, but the government is going to do that anyway, since they need the data to function.
(The marginal cost thing is why we need copyright and patents -- we need to impose non-market controls, because otherwise price and profit go to nothing and there is no incentive to create things which have marginal costs of nothing like sheet music and new molecular compounds. Yes, there is some irony whenever a capitalist argues for intellectual property -- save my market by non-market rules!)
Also, data is non rivalrous, unlike a stadium. Basically an unlimited number of people can access it.
OTOH, charging something might put the onus of paying for the collection a bit closer to the users, if that group of users is small and well-defined. It wouldn't be fair for them to reap large benefits at the expense of everyone else.
That said, though, if the users are a large and not well-defined group, opening up the data is probably more beneficial.
That doesn't completely address the county doing collection that benefits everyone by providing information to a small group of people, but I think it supports the notion that any prices should be set to mitigate the sharing costs, not the collection costs (because the county should be organizing data collection around beneficial activities, not around creating salable data sets).
Nonsense, GIS data typically found in municipal datasets requires going out to field and physically locating items such as underground utilities and stream edges, as well as, verifying data pulled from other sources.
The cost of reproducing that data is low, but then again, the cost of unlocking a stadium is equally low...roughly equivalent to the cost of quality assurance measures one might take before distributing a copy of municipal GIS data, or the cost of maintaining adequate bandwidth to distribute data sets the size of a county GIS database containing 6" resolution aerial photography.
And nobody just "unlocks a stadium".
Keep in mind that GIS data is constantly revised as ownership of parcels changes, infrastructure is added or improved, properties are rezoned or receive variances, or when the aerial photography base layer gets updated.
Much of that data is legally binding (e.g. zoning districts) or critical to protect the public (e.g. fire hydrant locations) or important for environmental planning (e.g. wetland locations). Municipal GIS data isn't just some mailing list mined from magazine descriptions.
Obviously you are missing the point, going to the stadium is the result of something being on show there, the "content". Therefore, it would not be free. What should be free (excluding maintenance costs which would need to be payed) is the usage of the stadium and actually it most likely is.
I know that in the UK I think there is a data liberation act or something similar, where you can request for data to be made available in public which was payed for with tax money. I think, however, that you shouldn't even need to ask.
If they don't want to publish the data, then don't pay for it with tax money...
You are cherry picking.
Access typically is restricted during non-performance times when marginal costs approach zero, e.g. one cannot walk around the track after work or have a Saturday morning Frisbee toss on the field because the gates are locked.
There is no moral justification for the government's charging more than the cost of duplication (which itself should only ever have to be paid once).
Every dollar in use fees for physical locations goes to defray the cost of the construction, use, and maintenance, lowering the actual taxpayer burden.
Cost of distribution for public information -- which will be collected regardless of use by anyone other than the government -- is de minimis. It is literally so low that it would cost the government more to do the accounting that could be reasonably charged for the act of distribution. What is unsupportable is not simply putting the data online.
The government serves the people, it is to act in their interest. It is unquestionably not in the people's interest to have this data charged for.