right uh it's 201 so i'm gonna go ahead and get
started good afternoon everyone uh thank you for joining today's webinar uh redefining non-metro uh
what does the ombs propose change changes to the metropolitan definition mean for rural america
my name is dan stern i'm the communications and outreach manager at the housing assistance council
and i'll be the host for today's webinar all the participants are in listen only mode which
means your line is muted however we do want to hear from you and are interested in uh getting
your feedback to submit a comment or a question you can use the chat function which should appear
in the menu bar at the top of your screen it looks like a little chat bubble uh so go ahead and type
in your questions and we'll be monitoring that as the presentation goes along and try to get to as
many as we can by the end of the presentation as you may have seen from a pop-up today's webinar is
being recorded the the recording and presentation will be available on hacks website within the
next couple of days after the presentation we will also be emailing it out to everyone who
attends uh so hacks website is www.ruralhome.org so if you're not familiar with us uh the housing
assistant council or hack as we often go by is a national nonprofit that's focused on um where we
that builds homes and communities in rural areas we've had a we've been around for 50 years
or right about it's our 50th and a birthday i guess you would say this year and we uh so
we were founded in 1971 for those of you who are good at math uh we the way we build affordable
homes is through financial products like loans and certain grant opportunities we also have uh
we offer technical assistance and training um trainings like today's webinar uh we also
have um sort of uh a lot of we produce a lot of research around rural housing and rural issues
and if you're not a subscriber to our hack news newsletter and our other information products you
want to be you can find all that information at our website as i said earlier rural home.org and
uh i'm going to introduce you to our presenter for today um a lot of you are probably
familiar with him but this is lance george he's our director of research and
information at the housing assistance council and i am going to turn the presentation over
to lance now thank you all for joining us hi everyone i'm lance george with the housing
assistance council thank you for joining us today for this discussion on the office of management
budgets changes to their metropolitan areas definition it's good to see everyone i'll be the
first to admit that i'm a little tired of this forum or medium i look forward to the day when we
can all kind of meet in person and see one another again but thank you for your participation and
attention it was stated earlier that the housing assistance council is a national non-profit that
supports affordable housing efforts in rural areas of the united states and we do that through an
array of activities one of those is to help inform strategies solutions and policies oftentimes it's
to help her i think most importantly to inform at the local community based level to inform rural
communities what policies and strategies and issues mean for their community but also to help
inform the larger debate and that's what we'll try today we to do today we really look forward
to your participation in your discussion on this issue because it'll help inform i think our
processes going further and the larger debate thank you we're primarily looking forward to
your insights and discussion on this issue today but to help inform that discussion we prepared
some really basic background information with four major components the first of which is
what are omb's metropolitan areas and what are the proposed changes it's a really primer
on the on the concept the second is how have mo omb's metropolitan areas intersected with rural
communities traditionally third we just really briefly look at what are some descriptive what
are the potential for some descriptive statistical changes in the areas what would this mean and
the fourth is what are the implications for this change programmatically and practically on the
communities you serve and the work that you do we'll start with a really basic overview of the
ombs metropolitan area concept and what are some of the proposed changes to that long-term concept
i could recite a really technical definition but at its essence omb's metropolitan area is
really in is a measure of economic connection or connectivity to a core urban area and that
urban area has traditionally been defined as uh popular that one with a population of 50 000
or more the kind of core area and then it also encapsulates surrounding communities that have a
social economic connection with that core urban area primarily through commuting to work i
mean then finally a fourth major component is that it's county-based so it includes counties
as its primary unit of geography although it aggregates up to a combined metropolitan area
it's a little more complicated than that and i can elaborate more in the discussion but i'll
leave it at those four major areas and that it is unique in the concept in the area that
it is a connection to a core urban area recently the office of management budget proposed
some changes to its metropolitan area standards this is really not that uncommon often
in conjunction with the decennial census they've presented changes and many of those
are traditionally tweaks are relatively innocuous or minor to help continually
improve the product in this designation but in this iteration there was one more
substantial change than what we typically see and that is that would basically change the
core threshold of what defines the core urban area and it doubles the threshold increases it
from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand so now in the proposed change um to qualify as a
metropolitan area you'd have to have a core urban area of one hundred thousand or more and that's a
relatively substantial change to this designation to help put the proposed changes in perspective
here's a really brief timeline of omb's metropolitan area definitions over the long
term and the very near term so this concept was first developed in the late 1940s and
was first really implemented in the 1950 census or after the 1950 census and changed
every 10 years with the in conjunction with the decennial census those were the major
changes from the 1950s up until present day again most of them the major changes came
every 10 years and they were incorporated oftentimes two to three years after
the release of the decennial census i know in 2000 the changes weren't incorporated
until 2003 and similarly in the 2010 census they came around 2013 the most recent set of standards
there are minor changes from year to year are from 2019.
So on january 19th 2021 omb submitted
the proposed changes that we're discussing today and those and comments on those changes are due
on march 19 2021 and consistent with past years the proposed changes are implemented
or proposed to be implemented in 2023 to present an illustration of
that omb timeline here's a map of the original metropolitan
areas in 1950 shaded in green and here are omb metropolitan areas in 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 and the most recent designation in 2019 which has
relatively minor changes from the 2013 designation and we'll discuss this in more detail in a
few minutes but the areas shaded in blue on this map are communities that are estimated to
lose their metropolitan area status as a result of the proposed changes again this is just
an estimate we don't have a definitive list yet but these are the estimates based
on the threshold populations in 2010. so you probably noticed in looking at those maps
that they progressively got more green as the years went on in essence there were just many
more metropolitan areas and more metropolitan territory and population added over the last 70
years and this is another way to illustrate that just from the inverse looking at i think what uh
the dynamic that many of us on this discussion are interested in the outside metropolitan areas
so in 1950 around 45 percent of the population lived outside of a metropolitan area but you'll
notice this kind of steady trend line moving down the proportion of the population to 2019
where it's estimated about 14.1 percent of the nation's population live outside a metropolitan
area so a pretty standard and dramatic decline in the outside metropolitan population and
just a continued trend towards urbanization and suburbanization in the united states over that
period of time at least measured by this indicator and then an estimate of the proposed change so
if those new thresholds were implemented it would increase the outside metropolitan population an
estimate up to around 19 or 20 percent again that is an estimate but indicated in the line but blue
in 2023 you would see an increase in the outside metropolitan area designation simply because
you would take away so many metropolitan areas before we get into a discussion of the
changes the proposed changes the o and b definitionaries i thought it might be instructive
or helpful to briefly look at how this designation has intersected with rural communities
in rural areas over the long term and currently so i will just qualify my comments
here that at least from my perspective there is no perfect definition of rural um some of you
may remember um the the famous demographer from the economic research service calvin beal and
i often say if calvin didn't find the perfect definition of rural it simply doesn't exist it
kind of i think he had a career the holy grail looking for that i would be interested to see
what calvin thinks of this current circumstance but i really do think there are pros and cons
to every definition but i think increasingly metropolitan and having a kind of an equation here
that says outside metropolitan area does not equal rural and i would say outside metro is qualify
this is increasingly a bad proxy for rural um areas where the omb designation has some
helpful elements but in many respects i i think it's my consensus and a lot of my
colleagues consensus that it is increasingly not a good proxy for rural areas it's becoming
more outdated and outmoded and just one comment on semantics i know i think it's even the title
of our presentation and you'll often hear the term non-metropolitan or non-metro colloquially
but technically that is an obsolete term it was these communities were referred to as
non-metropolitan prior to the 2013 designation but that was changed in the 2013 designation
and replaced by the term outside metropolitan core based statistical area which is a mouthful
so i know i still use the term non-metropolitan non-metro from time to time but we primarily
try to adhere to the outside metro vernacular i know this is going to sound like an
airing of grievances but there are three or four structural or systemic elements of the
omb classification they're just simply problematic in the rural context and the first of which
is what we would classify as the either or problem i mean this is not exclusive to omb
like many classifications it is dichotomous meaning there are only really two indicators for
example metropolitan or outside metropolitan our census defined urban or census defined rural or
another example is usda's eligible area definition for its housing programs either you're eligible
or you're not and in reality this dichotomous component really ignores the fundamental reality
of residential patterns in the united states so to put a finer point on this approximately
half of all americans live in a suburban community but in this binary context that suburban
population invariably gets lumped within into either urban or rural or metro or outside metro
populations and it distorts and often distorts or dilutes that dynamic in that in that context just
to show give you a geographic example in addition to the population standard the map to the left
all those areas indicated in yellow or orange light orange are suburban or x-urban communities
classified by the housing assistance council the omb designation also suffers
from the residual problem in that it's a very urban centric classification
so it goes into great detail about how a metropolitan area is defined but if you
are not in that metropolitan area there is no definition you're just the other than you're
the residual you're outside of that so it provides no discussion or analysis of rural
residential patterns it's simply based on the omb metropolitan area and if you don't
meet that classification you really are just outside of that simply stated that's what that's
what those communities are there's no designation or no analysis for that particular dynamic
it's just outside other than or the residual the omb classification increasingly has structural
concerns and i think this is a problem or concern regardless of whether it's inside metropolitan
or outside metropolitan so the omb classification is traditionally relied on two major indicators
one of which is just basic population counts and other commuting patterns but increasingly
many modern definitions of residential residential pattern rely on population density
or housing density and i think some of that is just because we have more computing capacity
we have the ability to actually do this now but in some respects this dynamic or this paradigm
might be coming increasingly outmoded or outdated to provide a potential illustration of that
structural problem here's a map and all of the areas outlined are the metropolitan areas that
we've previously seen in the maps that were green on in this shade in this map there's a different
shade of green where we believe at the housing assistance council all of those areas shaded in
green even though they are metropolitan areas where they have an outline in those shaded
and green are actually what we would classify as rural or small town territory so you
see again that incongruity between the rural and small town population i think this
is probably a function increasingly a function of that structural problem on the unit of analysis so this is the end of the airing of grievances for
outside metropolitan areas but i do think there is another and again increasing concern what we call
the geography problem particularly as it relates to rural areas so the as i noted before the omb
primary unit of analysis is the classification at the county level while counties definitely have
advantages most people understand where they live and they're often associated with in social
economic and political terms the county is not optimal in many designations and that's because
it just vary so much across the united states particularly in the western united states where
you have very large counties and i'll probably provide an example of that and i think
this also parlays just simply into that discussion where in the past we we
used the county we didn't have the computing capacity or the ability to do
sub-county analysis and now we simply do this is an example of the geography problem it's
uh with omb metropolitan areas it's often used and i should probably find something a little
more creative but i will resort to it as well so san bernardino cali in california is one
of the larger counties in the united states very large territories combined here with
riverside county but simply stated this county probably has you know more land mass
than several northeastern states combined but yet in this area it's some of the more remote
and forbidding territory the mojave desert so if you learn one thing from today's presentation it's
that the mojave desert is metropolitan but there you'll notice there are other large counties
in the west that kind of suffer this problem we have relatively large territory and some of
that is very rural territory but it's encapsulated into the metropolitan area because of the
county level designation there's another really good example in minnesota st louis county which
includes duluth at the very bottom tip but it goes all the way up to the canadian border a very large
county and again some of the more remote kind of canadian north woods and minnesota northwoods
another example of this issue so it really illustrates the variation in the county sizes and
another problematic issue with metropolitan areas we discussed the progression and some
of the structural elements of omb's metropolitan area classifications so now we'll
turn to some of the proposed modifications and that how that might alter the composition
of outside metropolitan area communities obviously this is going to vary from market to
market but we did provide a few estimates for selected social economic and housing
indicators to determine what impact the changes may have on again the composition of
those communities it's important to stress that these are simply estimates and we wouldn't
know until we got the exact census numbers so we've alluded to this dynamic of residents
in this discussion before noting that in some metropolitan areas you would have both urban
suburban and rural and small town territory in some of those communities we highlighted a
map before and typically that dynamic goes one way where in in metropolitan communities you
can have all three of those dynamics but outside metropolitan communities are are basically rural
and small town communities as illustrated here so under hax definition where we try to classify
uh identify urban suburban and rural and small town communities currently that we there are
no suburban or ex-urban communities outside of metropolitan areas but when you include the new
designations about 74 percent of the population in those estimated areas that would now revert back
to outside metropolitan areas are suburban and ex-urban population about nine percent is urban
and about 20 percent is rural and small town so that would be a dramatic change usually it goes
the other way but this is the indication where you would start to absorb suburban and urban
population within outside metropolitan areas in terms of absolute population around 14 percent
of the us population currently live outside of metropolitan areas and about 85 percent live in
metropolitan areas but under the new designation that would increase to about 19.5 percent of the
population living outside of metropolitan areas um generally speaking i think the 14 percent of
the population was a relatively low estimate of if it were a proxy for rural communities but at
the same time i don't know if the new designation is adequately capturing a proxy for rural
and small town population as previously noted the communities estimated to change their
metropolitan status are slightly more racially and ethnically diverse than current outside
metropolitan communities as an example about 78 percent of the population in current outside
metropolitan areas are white and not hispanic and that declines slightly in the new
proposed areas to about 74 75 percent and for example african american population would
increase from eight percent currently to about 10 percent and likewise for
hispanics the hispanic population would increase to about 10 percent
in the in the new selected counties income levels are slightly higher in the
new proposed outside metropolitan areas as opposed to the current metropolitan areas as an
indicator of the median household income currently in outside metropolitan areas is roughly fifty
fifty thousand dollars per year per household somewhere around forty nine thousand dollars in
the new counties that identified counties that could change in metropolitan status the
median income in those counties is somewhere in the neighborhood of 53 000 or 54 thousand
dollars annually and that in both of those are substantially lower than the national u.s
median income of 68 000 or somewhere above 68 000 so income levels would be a little higher in
the communities poised for change i'm having a little technical difficulty getting this graph
to display but we also looked at one particular housing indicator which i think is one of the
more salient issues is just housing affordability and there was um you know there are slightly more
affordability challenges in the communities that are poised for for change are referred to changing
metropolitan status so the level of housing costs burdened homes or units in those communities was
somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 percent of the occupied housing stock and in the current
omb metropolitan areas it's roughly 29.2 so not a major change both of those communities
have housing affordability challenges that are not unsubstantial but probably not at the level
of some higher level metropolitan areas as well i am somewhat confident that many of you joining
us today are particularly interested in this element of the discussion which looks at the
programmatic implications of how this change might impact your work and the services you
provide to your communities and your stakeholders i really hate to disappoint you but this is
largely where we are at with this dynamic so previously in this discussion i said
i wouldn't recite the technical language from the proposed rule but in this
instance i will so this comes directly from the proposed change omb establishes and maintains
these areas solely for statistical purposes in reviewing and revising these areas omb
does not take into account or attempt to anticipate any public or private sector
non-statistical uses that may be made of the delineations these areas are not designated to
serve as a general purpose geographic framework applicable for non-statistical activities
or for use in program funding formula so i remem remember reading this passage or
something very similar to it when i first became engaged in this in the early 2000s in the
2003 um omb designations and thinking that's odd um and i'll have to say we noted earlier in this
discussion of some of the structural challenges or some of the structural problems with the omb
designated metropolitan areas what i have to say this is probably the largest of those challenges
simply stated this position by omb just rely belies reality there are hundreds of federally
federally funded programs that administer billions of dollars of aid that are often statutorily tied
to this designation yet there is no effort or due diligence for omb to take responsibilities
for this element of their classification simply stated it's very difficult to estimate
the proposed changes programmatically so while we can't provide any detailed analysis of
the programmatic impacts here are a few examples of several programs selected programs that
could or could not that's the operative word be substantially impacted by these
changes in omb metropolitan areas and the first of which that comes to mind is
hud's community development block grant funds where one could envision and we've tried to read
the statute and regulations and it is somewhat unclear somewhat contradictory but potentially um
you know they're entitlement communities are tied to metropolitan areas and if a community lost
its metropolitan area status then conceivably it could also lose its entitlement status and
therefore go into the competitive pool with other non-entitlement communities which could have a
major implications for not only that community but the larger competitive
pool that's just one example at another level area median incomes which
are often very important for administering many of the resources and programs that you work
with are frequently tied to metropolitan areas and one could envision if a community lost its
metropolitan area status that it's no longer tied to a larger potentially a larger metropolitan
area and would have radically you know have a radical change in its area meeting incomes
almost overnight i neglected to mention in this discussion that one of the positive attributes
often associated with omb metropolitan areas is it's relatively simple and easy to understand
and incorporate i cannot say the same for usda's rural housing service eligible areas definition
this is probably one of the more complicated definitions of rural or eligibility that i've
ever seen however interestingly enough within that it actually uses usda definition uses omb
metropolitan areas what i would classify as an adjustment factor so i won't go into detail
but there could be downstream ramifications or residual ramifications from the change in the omb
metropolitan area on usda eligible service areas again this is the map those counties shaded
in blue would be communities that potentially would lose their omb metropolitan status and
revert back to outside metropolitan areas and one could envision the changes in the usda
provision of both single single family direct and guaranteed mortgage originations in
these communities it's hard to estimate but there would definitely be likely be
impact in these communities because of that again at another level hud's fair market rents
are often pegged to a metropolitan or geographic area that could have significant changes on the
fair market rents it's again very difficult to establish but one could imagine that there could
be potential ramifications for the changes in fair market rents particularly those communities
that would lose their metropolitan status and finally from yet another perspective
the omb metropolitan area definition has been relatively stable and constant over the
last 70 years and that has allowed researchers and analysts to conduct a large scale kind of
longitudinal analysis over a long period of time i'm not as sympathetic towards this particular
issue but i'm also a researcher and it has value again we at the housing assistance council have
increasingly try not to use omb metropolitan areas for statistical purposes for many of
the reasons we identified earlier in this discussion that it's simply not that good but in
many instances we are at the mercy of these data because there are no other data a good example
is the kovid 19 analysis is really only done at the metropolitan area similarly some of
the impacts of coven 19 we can only look at unemployment rates at from omb metropolitan
area so again very difficult to to determine but undoubtedly if you were to change radically
alter the definition or the classifications as much as they are proposed this would definitely
alter research and longitudinal analysis purposes i did not purposefully include this photograph
with the stop sign for this particular slide but it might be a good metaphor or a good
indication on how we do proceed or how the omb proceeds we noted several examples of
structural challenges of this classification and definition particularly as they relate to
rural communities or outside metropolitan areas it seems as if omb had a good opportunity here
during this process to address some of those and really what we see is potentially even
newer greater concerns with this particular designation so comments on this
issue are due to omb by march 19th and you can find a link to
submit your comments below on this slide the housing assistance council
will post this presentation and additional information such as interactive maps and the list
of potential communities that may lose their omb status you can also get more information at
hacc's website www.ruralhome.org i thank you very much for joining us today we look forward
to the discussion and garnering your insights and expertise and perspective on this important
process and how we should move forward so thank you very much i'm going to once again include
the information on how to submit the comments all right thank you lance for that presentation
um seeing a lot of activity in the chat so i'm pulling up some of these questions uh do you
have any comments right after the fact just to uh i i do dan can you hear me yes um first of all
i'd like to thank everybody again for joining us we're going to get to a couple of questions
i saw a few popping up in the chat but again we really appreciate everyone's
participation in attending today this is a really important issue it's
relatively new and complicated as you can see and we at the housing assistance council really
value your input and your insights to help inform our comments on this but also they help to
inform the entire community so we try to provide a little bit of background information
but we really value and look look towards your comments to help inform this process as well
and i would also just reiterate and reinforce that comments are due um we i think there's a
lot of power in the regulatory comment system so i think we need to hear from everyone comments
are due or would try to mar about 10 days from now march 19 2021 and we will provide additional
information on how to submit your comments or upload your comments and hopefully the housing
assistance council will have more information but we really wanted your input before we finalize
some of our comments or our input on this issue so i think i'll open it up to questions i did see
a couple that i'll probably just jump into dan and i think i really appreciate the community that's
one of the values of this medium i have to say sometimes i don't have to answer the questions
because some in the community we're already answering those questions there was a really good
question about micropolitan areas and this is this is important it is it was a new designation added
to the omb metropolitan area standards around 2003 i mean it incorporates primarily communities below
the metropolitan area threshold the traditional metropolitan area threshold but with a population
of urban population from 10 000 to 49 999 the important thing here and why we didn't talk
about it that much is it's relatively new i would welcome conversation on this it's not widely used
in my experience it's often used more for academic purposes it's not as widely used as the
delineation between outside metropolitan traditional and metropolitan but i don't
think that to the best of my understanding and i could be corrected on
this within the proposed changes that the omb micropolitan areas are slated for any
change and that's why we also didn't include it so it's a relatively new concept and in my
experience not widely used so we wanted to primarily focus on where the where most
of the changes were in this discussion i also saw dan and i'll just react to one other
i'm sure i missed them but i was trying to scan the chat um on the map so the housing assistance
council did produce some maps as you can see there is a map that's attached to the comments
that the federal register presented um and and that's an it's an appendix of what they also
estimated although we have in some of our analysis we have some questions on how that was calculated
we could not entirely replicate that um we got very close but there were a few communities that
we just simply couldn't replicate in our analyses and i think it's important to note that all many
of these presentations of the data were based on estimates and you wouldn't know the exact number
or the exact figure until the release of the 2020 decennial census so it's very close there's also a
little bit of confusion um within the ombs and if this is minor this gets into more geography speak
whether it was urban area or urbanized area so we will present that map but you can also
find maybe a more slightly more official map uh connected to the omb rule that will also
will also submit or will also post as well so i hope that helps answer that particular question
but there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 counties that potentially again that's
the operative word potentially could lose their metropolitan area designation
if these standards were enacted okay thank you for that lance uh there's a few
questions out there a few along the lines of uh this is asking you to break out your crystal ball
but how likely do you think this is to be enacted these the definition change considering there's
a new director of omb and other things like that um i'll be candid i don't know if i have
insights on that particular process i mean traditionally it's gone through this process this
was nothing new we all would always get these proposed changes or right around the decennial
census but there were never really of this magnitude or this gravity right that is a pretty
substantial change when you're doubling the the population threshold for a metropolitan area urban
area or urban core status for a metropolitan area so i'll be i'll be honest i don't know if i have
a crystal ball we've been in conversations with other colleagues and and other experts around
around this issue um it has traditionally proceeded but we hope that your comments and your
input can help influence this decision candidly and along those lines uh joshua stewart asks uh
if omb specifically denies programmatic slash funding impacts is something they will
take into account when weighing comments how can we best be persuasive
or impactful with our comments um this uh i think this is a really robust
discussion from um an august group i would say so we really appreciate that we are still
formulating our comments but i think it is um one of the major themes that's coming out
of this is and i would just point back to that stop sign that omb probably needs to stop and
revisit this entire issue notably around some of the systemic issues that rural communities have
been long overlooked in this designation even before the changes so there just needs to be more
attention and candidly just an acknowledgement that this even though it states that they
deny kind of any plausibility or there's uh of impacting larger issues outside
of that statistical definition it does there's no doubt that you can document
it's based in statute so um i would hope that they would listen to some of the comments or
the um positions from from community members and how this might impact your actual community
but it's very difficult to estimate that as well and uh you mentioned that county is not
necessarily a good measure to identify rural communities um what level of geography do
you think we should focus on i would i would go back and almost contradict myself dan and say
that county is not optimum um and but there is no probably perfect designation in many respects
many of you know and i often say this question um uh you probably everyone on the call knows
what county they live in but i would challenge almost anyone to tell me what you know the 11
digit number census tract that they live in so i think that's a challenge but increasingly
we at the housing assistance council use census tracts because it provides a more
granular level of analysis so it has its pros and cons as well like there's you know they're only
around 3 000 counties and again many people are much more familiar with that unit of analysis
or that unit of geography because of their political social and economic lives there are
over 72 000 and with the new decennial census there'll be more than 84 000 census tracts so it's
a little more unwieldy and i noted this before at least from the statistical purposes we didn't
even at the housing assistance council probably have the computing capacity to do some of this
work uh eight or ten years ago but now we do um and that's helped inform our work where we
increasingly move to uh the census tract as the unit of analysis but you can very easily
aggregate back up to a certain community um but there's no perfect definition there
either i'm also in that one hand other hand um okay uh are there any other changes
um beyond the urban area threshold that were presented in the recommendations so there
are a few additional changes that were presented and those would be more along the line what i
mentioned before uh in this process every 10 or 12 years you would get some almost around
the edges changes that would be incremental improvements one of those uh i think there are
there are several of them some of them i i believe are positive to have typically instead of larger
increments where you update the status they would be they would become in shorter frequency so you'd
have more updates that would be more up to date they discontinued uh there was a special
designation for northeastern communities and they proposed to discontinue that that unit of analysis
um and i think there was a more robust effort at uh help trying to define u.s territories with with
omb status so not all territories i think have this designation and there were some suggestions
around that and also to continually rely on the american community survey in this process but they
also state generally in that process um about uh you know working towards improvement so we think
that's a positive as well but what's taking up all the oxygen in the room is this threshold increase
to um that doubles the threshold increase and the rationale for that was simply that well population
has doubled since this was first enacted but that is a pretty blunt force instrument way to
to remedy or rectify that particular issue all right uh steve hirsch also points out that
uh the prior change took several years uh to implement this is offering a 60-day window so
that's just a interesting changed a note it looks like we don't have any more questions in the chat
directly if you'd like we can open up the lines i can we have a hand raised and we can allow some
people to ask questions verbally if that works um looks like uh bonnie nichols uh has her hand raised uh i've
set it to allow you to unmute so go ahead and if anybody does want to ask a question you
can go ahead and hit the raise your hand button it's one of the emotions that's listed at the
top of the screen and we'll get you in here um we in lieu of that we did get a question
in chat are there any indications that the change in classification would be accompanied with additional funding and or resources for
rural areas i i would i i think i could i don't know this gets into the crystal ball
dan i would say yeah i would i would speculate but at the same time i do think this is if if some
of these changes are enacted at the end of the day i think many programs or many uh administrations
that administer these funds can look back at that omb designation and say this is for statistical
purposes only and that we can make modifications to some of our programmatic delineations under
this relatively radical change i would hope that that would be considered by agencies and efforts
that command those resources at the very least okay well i am not seeing any
additional questions um so uh lance do you have any um final thoughts for
anyone oh wait no tom collishaw getting in there uh how do you think these regulations
will line up with the 2020 census so i like tom i can't speak directly
to that but i think oftentimes they are using my rural colloquialisms part and parcel
of the decennial census so this process really changes every 10 years um and it will it will
align in conjunction with the 2020 census interestingly enough i would say i'll make one
comment since we have a couple of minutes here when you look at this statistically
kind of like the data geeks that we are you see some anomalies show up in rural
communities within this analysis many of these communities that are potentially slated
to lose their lose their metropolitan status not all of them but several of them pop up
they are university towns that are probably influenced by uh students that are in those
communities and when tom mentioned the 2020 census one of the major challenges with getting the 2020
census numbers is that most college students have not been on campus for a year and it's been really
hard to document and enumerate that population and that could you know even further
impact this particular issue because you you do note um oftentimes we see this in
rural analysis where you see these minor anomalies really in cost burden and some other social and
economic elements and you look and you say how is that little island there what's going
on and oftentimes it's a college town and i think this in this instance related to the 2020
census i know that's somewhat of a non-sequitur tom but i would say college towns
could be more impacted than others purely from just looking at the map
and making some some off the cuff projections okay well if there are no further questions um i
think we can let you guys go a little bit early um uh so first of all i'd like to thank lance for
that presentation and all of you for bearing with us through some technical difficulties early
on um and just as a reminder uh recording this webinar and the presentation will be available
on our website which is www.ruralhome.org uh later on this week and uh once again
i'd like to thank you all for joining us just one more plea again thank you all i had to
dance thanks thanks the hack team for putting this together but um a couple of points just
to reiterate the importance of being heard here you we really would ask that you able you're able
to if possible to weigh in we'll try to facilitate that if we can but that is extremely important
this has been a relatively short process as you know it's only 60 days and this is a lot of
information to digest and consume but it is it could have relatively substantial ramifications
for rural communities so one thank you so much for your participation and your interest but you are
the most valuable entities here in letting people know how this could impact you and we'll try to
facilitate that but this is an iterative process so don't hesitate we'll be posting materials but
also don't hesitate to contact us if you have additional questions or insights is what we're
really looking for so thank you very much all right so again thank you all for joining us
and um we hope you enjoy the rest of your day thank you take care