Please add a FIPS field to this table

[adamlporter]

It would be very helpful to have FIPS data added to this table.

Currently,

• 4855 records lack county data.
• 373 rows have the word "county" in the city field; 297 of these rows have no value in the county field. This suggests that about 300 records were entered incorrectly.

Adding FIPS values would solve this confusion and make the data far more useful, since there are a lot of datasets that record information at the county level and include FIPS values.

For the rows that have lat/long data, adding FIPS is easy. (I did this in python by reading the Census dept's county map file and doing a geopandas.join() on the two tables).

But about 10 percent of the rows don't have lat/long data, which makes identifying the FIPS number more complex. Matching the county+state can be done, but there is no uniform way to record this information (is it 'Fairfax' or "Fairfax county') and typos will cause glitches.

Doubtless, there will be some rows for which this data remains unknown. But adding FIPS numbers to all the rows where possible would greatly facilitate cross-referencing this data with other data that is collected at the county level.