The hometown of NASA Astronaut Jim Voss is apparently on a federal list of metropolitan areas that may lose that designation. A total of one hundred and forty four metro cities, including Opelika, may be downgraded under a proposal that actual “cities” have at least one hundred thousand residents. That’s double the total that’s been in effect for seventy years. Cities with less than that number of dwellers would be known as “Micropolitan” statistical areas.
The website Alabama-Demographic.com says with the exception of Mobile, Huntsville, Montgomery, and Birmingham, every other community listed falls below the 100,000 mark. That includes Tuscaloosa, Hoover, Decatur, and Dothan.
The Office of Management and Budget is considering this proposal from a committee of representatives from federal statistical agencies. Supporters of the plan say federal funding doesn’t depend that the designation, although critics dispute that. Several housing, transportation and Medicare reimbursement programs are tied to communities being metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs, so the designation change concerns some city officials.
“The risk to vital services within our community, our state and the millions of impacted Americans across this country far outweigh any limited statistical value that might be gained from this proposal,” Opelika Mayor Gary Fuller said.
He wrote a letter to the federal budget office urged that the proposal be dropped. Rural communities are concerned that more micropolitan areas would increase competition for federal funding targeting rural areas. The change would downgrade more than a third of the nearly four hundred MSAs. Statisticians say the change in designations has been a long time coming. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1950. Back then, about half of U.S. residents lived in metros. Now, 86% do.
