Background
Under the provisions of Public Law (P.L.) 94–171 (Title13, United States Code (U.S.C.), Section 141(c)), the Director of the Census Bureau is required to provide the states with the opportunity to specify geographic areas, such as voting districts and state legislative districts, for which they wish to receive decennial census population totals. In order to comply with P.L. 94-171, the Census Bureau offers each state the opportunity to participate in the 2010 Census Redistricting Data Program.   Phase 2 of this process involves the submission of precinct boundaries for all counties in the state.

To support this program, Citygate was retained by the State of Pennsylvania Legislative Data Processing Center.   During the course of the project, Citygate will collect and aggregate all precinct boundaries for the State of Pennsylvania and format them for submission to the Census Bureau. 

A letter was sent to each County's board of Elections describing the project and requesting cooperation for the project. The following is an example copy of this letter.  

Letter sent to Adams County

Project Plan
Citygate will be contacting each county and requesting the current Precinct and Municipal Boundary Maps.  The following are the desired formats for the maps, in the order of preference:

1. ESRI Shape File Format
2. ESRI Geodatabase Format
3. Other ESRI GIS Formats, such as coverages or Export files.
4. Other GIS Formats such as MapInfo MIF Files
5. Digital files such as PDF, BMP, JPG or GIF.  (Assuming the files have sufficient detail)
6. Hard copy maps
7. Metes and Bounds descriptions
8. List of Streets
9. Written Descriptions

Citygate will accept the information from the counties and compile a digital map for submission to the Census Bureau.  The results of this work will be made available for review by the Counties in an online map accessed through a link on the left side of this page.  Any issues or concerns regarding our compilation can then be addressed prior to the submission to the Census Bureau.

After the Census Bureau receives the files, they will in turn update their databases and create new maps for review by the State.  Citygate will make these maps available online for review and comment by the Counties. 

Additional Information
It should also be noted that Precincts share common boundaries with municipal boundaries.  However, during this project we can only update the Precinct Boundaries.  The Census Bureau's Boundary Annexation Survey (BAS) is the project under which updates to municipal boundaries can be made. 

It is of paramount importance to the success of this project and the accurate tabulation of the 2010 Census that counties throughout Pennsylvania participate in the Census Bureau's BAS project.  You can get additional information about the BAS program at

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/bas/bashome.html

Project Contact Information
For additional information or other project concerns, you can contact:

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