Gainesville's MSA Designation Is Important

Gainesville and Hall County won a major battle the other day, a battle not a lot of people knew was going on and which many of us feared we had lost. The Federal Office of Management and Budget, using the data from the last Census, declared Gainesville and the area surrounding it as a Metropolitan Statistical Area ... an MSA. It is one of those bureaucratic decisions made in Washington which can, in may ways, make or break a community, almost as important as whether you get an interstate highway or not.

The importance of MSA statistics is in the way they are used. You will hear a lot about how getting an MSA designation will help a community get more Federal money, which irritates me because that is not the primary benefit. It is in the business world that having a separate MSA designation makes the big difference. For instance, if a company is looking to locate in Georgia, they will review each of the MSA areas individually to see if that area fits their needs. If a retail chain is considering the region, they will review each MSA. Same with marketers planning their advertising. That's just the beginning.

Hall County had grown to the point where the Feds had two choices: either lump us in the Atlanta MSA with all those other counties, or list us as an MSA of our own, which would indicate Gainesville was the hub of the Northeast Georgia trading area. Thank goodness we got the latter, for being the low guy on the totem pole in the Atlanta area wasn't very promising. This designation will likely hold for 10 years, till the next census.

But to me the real benefit from the MSA designation is the fact we are now in position to have a real "sense of community", an image separate from the metro area, a character of our own rather than being a nameless, faceless suburb of Atlanta. But it won't just happen; we'll have to work for it.

This is Gordon Sawyer, and may the wind always be at your back.