(Image provided by the City of Oshkosh)
Oshkosh and Fond du Lac will remain “metropolitan areas” for at least another ten years. The federal Office of Management and Budget has backed off from a plan to increase the population thresholds for what it considers to be a Metropolitan Statistical Area. The O-M-B was looking to boost the limit to 100-thousand people in a central city area from its current standard of 50-thousand. That could have meant reduced federal funding for cities like Oshkosh and Fond du Lac–and a different view from businesses looking for new places to locate. Those small cities would have been re-categorized as “micropolitan areas”.
