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Fair division of labor in a village

July 28, 2026 Editorial Team 1
: engineeringdatanotebookpythonpolarspandas

I live in a village, where there are many empty houses, which means local government has only a very small budget for essential services.

Some neighbors want to volunteer their time to help clear weeds from the streets. Some other residents would prefer that we paid a contractor to do the work and that the bill was split fairly.

How can we equitably split the work and any bills up?

Idea 1: By ratio of frontage

If your property has a large border with the street, you have whatever benefits that brings (more light, on-street parking, etc) so maybe you should be responsible for the more of the street.

Data source and exploration

The Sede Electrónica del Catastro provides public datasets as compressed archives with every property boundary in Shapefile format.

Data processing and visualization

The archive I downloaded was called 27_UA_23012026_SHP.zip and contained data for the whole province of Lugo.

After extraction:

tree -d 27_UA_23012026_SHP

27_UA_23012026_SHP
...
├── 27048uA 27010 A PONTENOVA
├── 27049uA 27106 PORTOMARIN
├── 27050uA 27052 QUIROGA
├── 27051uA 27054 RIBADEO
├── 27052uA 27056 RIBAS DE SIL
...