The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is seeking public comments on proposed changes to its standards for defining metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, as recommended by the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area Standards Review Committee. These areas help in the collection and publication of federal statistics and have been in use for about 70 years. The committee has suggested several updates, such as increasing the minimum population required for an area to be considered metropolitan from 50,000 to 100,000 and discontinuing certain classifications in New England. Comments from the public are encouraged to help shape the final standards.
Simple Explanation
The government wants to change how they group cities and towns together for counting people and understanding areas better. They might make some of these groups bigger and stop using certain ones, and they want people to say what they think about these changes.