Metro-area eligibility shouldn’t be changed

It’s not the kind of thing that many people wake up thinking about, but for those people who live and breathe this stuff, yes, it causes them pause. We are referring to a rule committee recommendation to the Office of Management and Budget that would change the population requirement for a metropolitan statistical area from 50,000 to 100,000. Stay with us, here.

Because the Pine Bluff area has lost population over the past few decades, it is unlikely that the MSA that Pine Bluff is now in would qualify.

The MSA for the Pine Bluff area includes parts of Jefferson, Lincoln and Cleveland counties, with a population of about 85,000.

That number includes an estimated Pine Bluff population of just under 40,000, some 9,000 fewer residents than we had in the 2010 census. At that time, the MSA for the area was slightly more than 100,000.

Larry Reynolds, director of the Southeast Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, said the change would be of major concern. For one, he said, the switch would take the eight planning areas and reduce their number to two.

The other change, which is more concerning, he said, would be the significant loss of funding.

“We would lose federal funding,” Reynolds said, “which makes up the majority of our funding.”

That could mean loss of money for transportation, including the city’s transit system, as well as money that funds Community Development Block Grants, which address needs in underserved communities.

If the tsunami of objections to the change has an impact, then perhaps the proposed revision won’t go through.

The Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations has said there is “no sound reason” to justify doubling the threshold for federal aid.

“This does not appear to be a scientific methodology for making such a significant change,” the association wrote to the Office of Management and Budget.

U.S. Sens. John Boozman, R-Ark., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., also wrote a letter urging that the proposed change be abandoned. They said the change would cause “major disruptions with grant and entitlement programs, medical reimbursements, economic development, housing initiatives, and more.”

This proposal would seem to be an example of bad public policy. Planning commission members have been helping regional districts for as long as we can remember. Even if most of us don’t think about them very often, they are the people who study problems, understand federal programs and attract federal aid to address those problems.

Getting rid of these underpinnings that support such aid is shortsighted, especially locally, where we will suddenly not qualify for a whole raft of federal programs. For that reason, we support Sen. Boozman’s efforts to have the OMB reject this proposal.