Last week, Journal Gazette enterprise editor Ron Shawgo wrote about how Allen County was passing on an opportunity to be part of a program to create statewide digital maps.

Instead of providing maps that show roads, land parcels and other information that can be viewed for free online, Allen County has decided to keep the information for itself and charge people for the maps. The price for a digital map of roads, land parcels, addresses and jurisdictional boundaries is $15,000.

The rationale is that the county has spent millions of dollars – taxpayer dollars, by the way – assembling the information, and it doesn’t seem right to offer it up for free online to anyone who fancies looking at it.

In a way, that makes sense – until you consider that last year, the county made only $45,000 selling such maps. That’s a tiny fraction of what it spent to produce the maps and not enough money to even cover the expenses of the office that sells the information. So the whole plan is a money-losing proposition from the word go. The longer Allen County insists on selling its maps, the more money it loses.

The county could change its mind easily. All the county’s iMap board would have to do is vote down the county’s policy. But various officials say it’s not high on their priority list and the political climate isn’t right for a change.

It all makes one wonder what people are thinking and whether common sense has been left behind.

Now, all this talk about digital maps might seem pretty ho-hum to the average Joe who will probably never look at these maps and would find them largely useless. It’s not as though Allen County isn’t on the map. We’re still here. Who cares, really?

Well, at a time when the unemployment rate in Allen County is above 9 percent, here are some reasons why people might care.

I spoke to Jill Saligoe-Simmel, the former director of the Indiana Geographic Information Council and a big advocate of counties participating in the statewide map.

Last year, Saligoe-Simmel went to an economic development conference where one of the speakers was a representative of a Fortune 500 location firm that does national and international searches for companies seeking to set up operations.

What he had to say stunned Saligoe-Simmel. Location firms don’t bother going to individual county Web sites for information. They prefer the efficiency of using large databases when looking for suitable sites, and if information on a particular county isn’t available on a database, it is automatically out of consideration.

“I don’t think it’s a cost factor,” Saligoe-Simmel said on the issue of having to pay for maps. “It’s a convenience factor.”

Some might think that if a company is considering Allen County as a possible site, making the company pay a visit to the county will give local economic development officials a chance to buttonhole company officials and pitch the county as a wonderful place to do business.

The truth, Saligoe-Simmel said, is that a county’s absence on detailed maps means no one will ever approach that county’s doorstep.

Representatives of companies looking for a new home have their own way of doing business. They will do an initial search, narrowing down locations, and then another search.

“By the third stage, they pick up the phone” and start contacting people about potential sites, said Jim Sparks, the state’s geographic information officer. “They cut out areas that aren’t interesting, and one thing that makes an area not interesting is a lack of information.”

When Honda was interested in building a new plant in this region of the country, Sparks said, company officials wanted information on the region, “and they wanted the information right now.”

Allen County’s decision not to participate in the statewide digital map isn’t unique. In all, 15 counties have not taken part. Most are small counties, such as Ohio and Floyd – small counties on the Ohio River – and Marshall, Fulton, White, Carroll and Union counties, which are mostly rural.

The notion of selling maps was a business model sold to counties by business consultants 10 or 15 years ago, Saligoe-Simmel said.

“Allen County isn’t the only county that’s fallen into that trap,” she said.

Just remember this. Right now, when businesses looking for a possible location to set up operations turn to the state’s digital map that shows roads and land parcels that might make a suitable home, in the space occupied by Allen County it might as well say, “Here be dragons.”