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Pittsburgh metro area may be redefined as mega and micro areas Change by federal government may leave Butler and Fayette counties to go off on their own Wednesday, March 22, 2000 By Pamela Gaynor, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As the federal government reshuffles the counties that make up metropolitan areas across the country, Pittsburgh could be dealt a new hand.
What's almost certain is that it will rank as one of a new category of metro areas that the White House Office of Management and Budget, together with the Census Department, plan to identify as "megapolitan" areas.
What's not clear is whether it will be composed of all the same counties that now make up the what most people know as the six-county region.
What does it matter?
For one thing, federal agencies charged with channeling federal funds to programs ranging from transportation to health care, base their allocations in part on the metro areas' population.
There's also an inevitable psychological impact: When metro regions appear to be growing and increasing in rank relative to others, there's a sense of uplift. When they appear to shrink or lose standing relative to others, there's a sense of decline.
Under proposed standards that will undergo final public comment beginning March 30, the White House, with help from the U.S. Census Bureau, will begin defining three kinds of metro areas: Megapolitan, macropolitan and micropolitan.
The revisions in metro areas, which are performed every 10 years with fresh census data, would not take effect until 2003.
Along with 34 other large cities, Pittsburgh and some of its surrounding counties would constitute a megapolitan area.
However, the new standards could also give birth to a couple of new, freestanding metro areas in this region.
The reason is that towns with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 will be considered for standing as micropolitan areas if they have developed enough of a business base that no more than 25 percent of their residents commute elsewhere for their employment. They can also gain standing as micropolitan areas if more than 25 percent of jobs in their are own counties are filled by people from outside.
As a test to see how the new standards could redefine metro areas, the U.S. Census Bureau applied them to 1990 census data.
In this region, that model showed that Butler and Fayette counties each would have been micropolitan areas, with the cities of Butler and Uniontown serving as their respective hubs.
Given that, Pittsburgh would have been left as the hub for the four county megapolitan area of Allegheny, Beaver, Westmoreland and Washington Counties.
Among 35 megapolitan areas measured in the test, Pittsburgh ranked 22nd in size. Under standards for metro areas, the six-county Pittsburgh area of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland ranks 20th.
There remains a question as to whether the new standards will produce the same result when applied to the year 2000 census data that is being collected now.
And, even if the result is the same, it is not known how federal agencies will employ them as they apportion federal funds.
There are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that even if Butler, Fayette or both qualify for standing as micropolitan areas, OMB and the Census are constructing yet another statistical way of defining economic regions. Broader metro areas, called "combined areas" or "overlays," will encompass both megapolitan areas and nearby micropolitan areas.
"If they apply the overlay [for funding purposes], we wouldn't really see the effects," said Richard Moody, a regional economist with PNC Financial.
Moody doubts that it will happen, but even if the old six-county metro area is split into new micropolitan and megapolitan areas, new funding formulas probably won't be solely determined by the new metro area definitions or the agencies that fund federal programs.
"Congress is obviously going to have some say," he said.
How likely is it that Butler or Fayette will be pried away from the Pittsburgh megapolitan area?
Gordon DeJong, a Penn State University professor of sociology and demography, said it's too soon to say.
"To take 1990 census data ... and plug it into some new criteria doesn't give you a very good idea of what's going to happen with the new census data," he said.
Moody, however, said there's good reason to believe that at least Butler will become a micropolitan area.
The reason: The trend of Butler residents finding employment in their home county has probably strengthened since 1990.
"I would be surprised if the number weren't higher now," Moody said.
The trend in Fayette is more difficult to assess.
But the impact of losing it from the region's statistical profile would be far less than the impact of losing Butler, Moody said.
"Fayette is a smaller county and it doesn't have nearly the same growth rate, so it won't hurt nearly as much as losing Butler," Moody said.
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