Bureaucratic label may affect future funding

Nobody seems to know much about a new bureaucratic label for the Cape Girardeau area.

According to the federal Office of Management and Budget, we have been a Micropolitan Statistical Area for three weeks.

Experience and recent history would indicate this is a sort of first runner-up for the "urbanized area" label, which the cities of Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Scott City barely missed out on last year because the geographic area of the three cities didn't have sufficient population density.

With the "urbanized area" label, officials could have formed a metropolitan planning organization and had a say in how federal highway dollars were spent in the area.

Instead, local officials are wondering what being "micropolitan" means. The short answer: nothing really, at least for now. It's just a statistical tool.

But the director of the Rural Policy Research Institute in Columbia, Mo., says the designation ultimately will be used by the federal government in handing out tax dollars nationwide.

It may take several years to figure out the formula, but there will be congressional hearings in the fall on using census data for funding issues.

The more informed local leaders become before those hearings, the better chance the region has of getting a piece of that pie.