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catalyst-cooperative / rmi-energy-communities

Partnership between Catalyst and RMI to identify energy communities as defined by the Inflation Reduction Act
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Switch to using Census MSA delineations? #116

Closed katie-lamb closed 1 year ago

katie-lamb commented 1 year ago

Currently I'm using the QCEW to MSA crosswalk from the BLS website to delineate the counties within MSAs.

The new guidance says to use Office of Management and Budget standard to delineate MSAs. This Census page says a little more the OMB MSA definitions and gives delineation files that are supposed to follow the OMB definitions.

The Census delineations vary from the BLS crosswalk in a lot of the MSAs.

Should I make the switch to using the OMB delineations even though it might not map as nicely to the QCEW data? I think it is likely that some of the QCEW data doesn't have an associated MSA or certain MSAs don't have QCEW data.

katie-lamb commented 1 year ago

I just checked the difference between the BLS and Census delineation files and the BLS crosswalk follows the OMB in its April 18, 2018 bulletin (Bulletin No. 18-03) as specified by the energy communities Treasury/IRS guidance.

Thus, I'm going to stick with the BLS delineation file over the Census file.