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 and tribal officials to oversee the local involvement in geographic area delineation and data user assistance. This chapter provides an overview of the specific technical functions performed by the CSACs, numerous State and other agencies, and tribal officials involved in delineating, reviewing, and maintaining small-area geographic units for purposes of data presentation. It also discusses the manner in which many of these committees, agencies, and officials operate, and their relationship to the Census Bureau’s operations and to the opportunities posed by the automation of the Census Bureau’s Geographic Support System.

Dr. Walter Laidlaw, a clergyman, originated the concept of small, permanent geographic areas that retain their identity for long periods of time and are not subject to the vagaries of the location and relocation of boundaries of various legal entities. In 1905, he proposed dividing the city of New York into small, permanent geographic areas, later called census tracts. The Census Bureau adopted his plan as part of the 1910 decennial census. Beginning in the 1920s, Howard Whipple Green, a statistician in Cleveland, became a leading advocate of census tracts and other small areas. For more than 25 years, Green encouraged local citizens, via Census Tract Committees, to establish such areas and to use the resulting data for local applications. He actively promoted the Census Tract Committees as a mechanism for preparing census tract plans, and worked tirelessly to make data users aware of the value of small-area statistics.

In 1931, the American Statistical Association (ASA) appointed Green chairman of its newly created Committee on Census Enumeration Areas. This committee, with the Census Bureau’s support, encouraged the creation of census tracts in the most populous cities throughout the Nation. Although the establishment of census tracts has always been a matter of local initiative, the Census Bureau has, nonetheless, taken a keen interest in the work of the Census Tract Committees. In Sources of Local Assistance3-3