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 Chapter 13

The general concept of a metropolitan area (MA) is that of a core area containing a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with that core. The Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) designates and defines MAs following a set of official standards. (The MA standards for the 1990s were published in the Federal Register on March 30, 1990—Vol. 55, No. 62, pp. 12154–12160.) The MA classification is provided for use by Federal agencies in the production, analysis, and publication of data.

An interagency committee—the Federal Executive Committee on Metropolitan Areas (FECMA)—advises the OMB on the development of the MA standards with the aim of producing definitions that will be as consistent as possible for all MAs nationwide. Also, the Bureau of the Census plays a key technical role by providing virtually all data used in the MA definition process, mostly from the decennial census.

Included among MAs are metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), consolidated metropolitan statistical areas (CMSAs), and primary metropolitan statistical areas (PMSAs). In addition, New England county metropolitan areas (NECMAs) are an alternative set of areas defined for the six New England States.

An MSA consists of one or more counties that contain a city of 50,000 or more inhabitants, or contain a Census Bureau-defined urbanized area (UA) and have a total population of at least 100,000 (75,000 in New England). Counties containing the principal concentration of population—the largest city and surrounding densely settled area—are components of the MSA. Additional counties qualify to be included by meeting a specified level of commuting to the counties containing the population concentration and by meeting certain other requirements of metropolitan character, such as a specified minimum population density or percentage of the population Notes and References Metropolitan Areas13-1