States common measures project auto body sector

Vermont will use the following sources of information to identify the universe of facilities involved in auto body activities. 

The primary source is a web-based search of the yellow pages (switchboard.com) which identifies 235 such facilities in Vermont using the key words:

• 
  autobody repair and painting
  
• 
  auto customizing, conversion and restoration
  
• 
  antique and classic auto restoration and repair
  
• 
  mobile auto service and repair
  
• 
  collision services
  
• 
  custom auto painting
  

Another source will be to review hazardous waste shipment data for facilities with names containing any of the words included in the above search categories,

plus dent or ding.

The final source is the list of auto body shops maintained by the Vermont Auto Body Association – a fledgling association that has had difficulty in attracting members (6) but has a mailing list of about 200 who receive their newsletter.  The large majority of these facilities will be included in the web search.  This exercise was also performed in 2002 in preparation for mailing of outreach materials to this sector – the total mailing at that time was around 225 facilities.  Internal databases maintained by the DEC’s Waste Management Division and Air Pollution Control Division that might include body or collision shops would be duplicative and very minor in comparison. 

We identified our universe using the Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation’s licensee list of Auto Body Shops.  Their regulations require licensing for those performing “motor vehicle body work”, which is required not only for those performing auto body work but for those installing glass or sub-contracting auto body work (i.e. a car dealership or repair shop that performs any functions related to the work, such as taking in vehicles and sending them to auto body shop(s) or writing up the work order to send to an auto body shop). 

With our certification program checklist package, we include a Facility Non-Applicability Statement that licensees that don’t perform actual auto body repairs can fill in and submit to us (such as those sub-contracting).  Since those licensees are not performing the work, they won’t be certifying, but it is helpful for us to be aware of them and their status.  Thus, when the certifications come in, we come up with the list of auto body shops actually performing auto body repairs.
NEW YORK

We've done universe identification for Auto body shops in our Regions 4 and 9.  We got statewide lists from most of our sources also.

The first thing we did was have a temporary employee do a yellow page search on a number of keywords throughout the two regions.  We searched on Auto body, collision, dent, and a few others.  That was a largely manual process, which had the facilities entered into an access database.  (This search still constitutes about half the list)

The next items were to pull lists of auto body shops for all our regions from our manifest system, and our air facility system. (statewide information)

We then requested a listing of facilities from our Department of Motor Vehicles. (statewide information).  This list took a lot of work since DMV has both registrations as auto body and auto repair.  Auto repair registration allows more work to be done including auto body, so many of the shops had registered as auto repair.  We had to try to ID the universe of auto body shops from the auto repair. 

The last effort involves manifests from CESQGs.  The manifests from these facilities are not entered into our manifest system, so we couldn't cull their names out of our manifest system.  Starting in 10/05, we began collecting the CESQG manifests and manually culling out the auto body shops (printers also since they are our next universe).  Surprisingly, this has identified quite a few shops we hadn't gotten through the other four methods.  (We've only inputted the Region 4 and 9 facilities so far, we have hundreds of others to input from the rest of the state).  

After putting the different sources together, we then sorted in a number of ways to identify facilities found from multiple sources.  We sorted on different fields like name, phone number and address to identify the overlapped facilities. 

http://www.yellow.com/ (searches six at once: yellowpages.com, 411.com,

dexknows.com; yellow.com, and white pages.com)

http://www.superpages.com/ has the same categories, but I don't think it

is included in the www.yellow.com list so we should all do both

-autobody repair and painting

-auto customizing, conversion and restoration

-antique and classic auto restoration and repair

-mobile auto service and repair

-collision services

-custom auto painting

-auto paint (seems to have both autobody shops, and paint sales and

paint booth sales)

2) Reviewing hazardous waste shipment data for facilities with names

containing any of the words included in the above search categories,

plus dent or ding

3) Info USA pull of the facilities with any autobody related SIC codes in their "selected", primary, secondary 1, secondary 2, or secondary 3 classification.

NOT PEOPLE WHO ONLY HAVE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING SIC CODES:

We might at some point in the future want to get a sense of how many unpublicized auto body facilities there are, in which case we would pick a few cities and towns and work with fire departments, planning departments, boards of health...

Scale of WA Sectors by different NAIC code digits

Auto Service Sector NIAC     8111xx = 3625 businesses

Auto Service Sector NIAC     81112x = 1201 businesses

Auto Service Sector NIAC     811121 = 1097 businesses

How did I get those numbers for WA?.....I bought an ESRI ArcGIS extension product called "Business Analyst" for WA only. (cost $8500  but see notes below) 

This data includes the spatial location information for more than 200,000 businesses in WA searchable by NIAC, SIC or name or whatever you want. The information comes from their vendor infoUSA who have thousands of staff going through records and yellow pages. It’s their businesses. I checked some sectors against our Department of Revenue Taxable entities records and estimated that the infoUSA data contains around 88% of all businesses WA . Not too shabby since we did not know where these businesses were previously. The WA tax records mainly have billing addresses so that was not much use for situs addresses.

One glitch is that infoUSA is in the business of selling mailing lists at $70 per 1000 so we will have to pay more ($negotiable) to "unlock" the address and contact information from the Business Analyst.