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ramanshahdatascience / townmunculus

Get vital stats of U.S. cities, counties, and town(ship)s with minimal keystrokes
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Example of a missing township #4

Closed ramanshah closed 2 years ago

ramanshah commented 2 years ago

At ICMA22, I met the Assessor of Cunningham Township, IL, which is not in townmunculus. Where if anywhere does this live in the Census database, and is there a revision that could bring it in?

ramanshah commented 2 years ago

In the source data:

$ Ag 'Cunningham township'
SUB-EST2020_ALL.csv
9662:061,17,019,00000,18121,00000,0,B,Cunningham township,Illinois,41250,42137,42247,42419,42560,42733,42939,43090,43054,42803,42525,42190,41873,41724
40098:061,29,041,00000,17776,00000,0,A,Cunningham township,Missouri,217,215,215,213,211,211,211,209,207,205,205,205,204,203
40100:071,29,041,99990,17776,00000,1,F,Balance of Cunningham township,Missouri,115,113,113,112,111,111,111,110,109,108,109,109,108,108
ramanshah commented 2 years ago

Actually, I'd manually excluded coterminous IL/MO city/township pairs, very explicitly, in towns_to_exclude.csv. Cunningham Township IL was explicitly left out of townmunculus to deduplicate it with respect to Urbana IL.

Looking deeper: The City of Urbana and Cunningham Township are different but closely related entities. The city council of the former is the board of supervisors for the latter. But they both have revenues, operations, and offices. The Cunningham Township Assessor's office is ctao.us which is not recognizable as Urbana IL.

Apropos of the purpose of townmunculus - "Where is this place, and what's its population?" from a few keystrokes - it feels better to dial back the deduplication in the case where coterminous city and township pairs don't have the same name. If I can't find a place based on a business card, that's a problem. I'll still deduplicate when the name, state, and population are identical except for the last (city/village/town) word.