Unfunded Mandate Amendment Gains Support

The legislative session is over now and the County Information Project is turning its attention from putting together fiscal notes to other projects such as reviewing the questions we’ve received, a process we go through on an irregular basis, to see what trends are developing. Have there been requests for updates on reports we’ve generated? Do we need to start collecting information that we haven’t collected in the past? Are we continuing to see questions that we were unable to answer previously, but now might be able to answer?

The last question is the subject of this article. While plans are still being developed, one of the three needs we have identified so far is to update our report on which counties use the unit road system – basically, which counties have a road engineer to oversee road work throughout the county instead of having each commissioner oversee the road work in their individual precincts.

Of course, simply knowing which counties have either the unit system or the precinct system isn’t going to be sufficient. As always, our customers, meaning county officials, are going to have other questions about those counties. So we’re going to update an old survey form and get it sent out sometime later this summer – probably in August or September.

I’ll be away on two weeks with the Navy Reserve in June and therefore unable to respond. So, if you have any questions or comments about that upcoming unit road survey or report that need a reply, please contact Bruce Barr at BruceB@county.org.

The second item that we would like to address is a bit more difficult. Every year we receive numerous questions about either rural or urban counties. Our response is always the same: we can tell you what information is available about those counties, if you can tell us how you want to define “rural” or “urban” counties. Almost everyone is surprised to learn that there are no generally accepted definitions for rural or urban when applied to counties.

The federal government, through the U.S. Census Bureau, defines urban and rural areas; but, areas do not equal counties. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service uses “Rural-Urban Continuum Codes” to classify counties into three metro and six non-metro groupings.

In 2002, the Texas Legislative Council found numerous definitions of rural in Texas statutes and the Texas Administrative Code. While it does not address urban counties or areas, this document does note eight distinct definitions for rural counties. We’ve recently done some work on updating that research, but it gets us no closer to a definition of either urban or rural counties.

This past session we were asked, “How does TAC define rural counties?” The blunt answer is that we don’t. To be even blunter, we don’t believe that you can define a county as either urban or rural. We think you need at least one more category. or example, in a survey conducted several years ago, we asked county officials if their county was rural, urban or suburban.

As best we could tell, population was not a major consideration in answering this question. Counties of well over 100,000 were reported to be rural, while counties under 50,000 were described as urban. his may explain why the Census Bureau does not provide a definition.

It is no secret that Texas is changing; there have been numerous articles over the last few years discussing the urbanization of the state. As a result, we’ve asked ourselves about transitional counties – those that recently have been considered rural, but that are now becoming urban.

In the past, I’ve taken a stab at trying to come up with a method for categorizing counties as either urban or rural. As you might guess, success has been elusive. While I’ve spoken to a number of people familiar with numerous counties, mostly TAC employees, the only criteria that has anything close to universal acceptance is the familiar refrain, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

What do you think? Is it possible to classify counties? If it is possible, is your county urban, rural or something else? If it is something else, what is it? How do you know? What criteria did you use to make that determination? I would be interested in hearing from any county official with an opinion on this subject.

Please contact me at TimB@county.org if you have any questions or comments. As previously mentioned, I will be away for two weeks in June on active duty, so responses will be delayed!

The third item the CIP wants to address this interim is our fiscal note procedures. The need to address this issue is discussed more fully in the article “Improving the CIP Fiscal Note Process.”