GREENSBORO - Recently released data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey -- the government's annual survey of social, economic and housing characteristics for the nation -- may have titanic consequences for the Triangle.

The 2010 ACS will be used by the Office of Management and Budget to re-evaluate how metropolitan areas are defined. Triangle leaders are still recovering from the last time the feds conducted a similar redefinition, in the early 2000s.

Although the Triangle promotes itself around the world as a powerful region, the federal government split the region in two back in 2003 when it introduced the new metropolitan standards. The Triangle as we know it nearly disappeared off the map.

In 2000, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area was ranked 41st in total population with 1,187,941 residents. That all changed on June 6, 2003, when OMB introduced the new definitions. The old metropolitan area shrank dramatically in size.

The new Raleigh-Cary metropolitan statistical area includes only Franklin, Johnston and Wake counties. In 2007, it had a population of 1,047,629 and ranked just 49th in the nation. Worse, under the 2003 definitions, the Durham metropolitan area (which included only Chatham, Durham, Orange and Person counties) ranked just 103rd nationally in 2007.

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WHAT EXACTLY ARE METROPOLITAN AREAS and why do some folks care about them?

Metropolitan Statistical Areas are used for compiling statistics. Those statistics are used by corporate executives when making decisions on new plant locations, advertising and retailing. The federal government also uses metropolitan data when making major budget decisions relating to health care, public housing and transportation.

The crude cleaving of the Triangle reflected the imposition of much stricter commuting thresholds under the new system. Under the 2003 rules, counties were tied together if 25 percent of the employed residents of an outlying county worked in the largest populated county in the MSA, or vice-versa. Commuter flows between Raleigh and Durham did not reach this 25 percent threshold and as a consequence the region was effectively split in two by OMB.

According to the Brookings Institution, the Triangle was one of only nine metropolitan areas larger than 500,000 that were split apart in this fashion. Matters were made worse when national rankings in influential economic development magazines continued to be largely based on MSA data. The Triangle plummeted in many of these rankings because MSA-based data does not capture the entire region.

That said, the news is not all bad. The Office of Management and Budget also allowed some MSAs to be tied together in much larger so-called Combined Statistical Areas based on less stringent commuting thresholds. Fortunately, a truly Triangle-wide CSA qualified under these rules, which allowed the region's major cities to come together under one umbrella. Based on 2007 data, the eight-county Raleigh-Durham-Cary CSA was a substantial market with a population of 1.6 million, ranked 28th in the nation.

Although this is good news, William Frey of the Brookings Institution has argued that CSA's are ill-suited for cross-metropolitan analyses. The Office of Management and Budget also recommended that national rankings should continue to be based on MSA, not CSA data.

A forthcoming public comment period regarding potential revisions to the federal standards for defining metropolitan areas provides an important opening for Triangle leaders. Rather than being left out in the cold this time around, the Triangle needs to quickly put together a region-wide working group to consider some alternative metropolitan definitions for OMB to consider.

At the top of the agenda should be figuring out ways to put Raleigh and Durham back together again.

One approach might be to develop a coalition with other metropolitan areas that have been similarly impacted by the 2003 definitions, such as the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point area and the Greenville-Spartanburg S.C., region.

If we do nothing, we are guaranteed to be hamstrung with metropolitan definitions that continue to hinder, not help, the Triangle's long-term competitive advantage.

(Keith G. Debbage is a professor of urban geography at UNC-Greensboro and a GlaxoSmithKline Fellow with the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State University.)

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