McDonald County, in Missouri's southwest corner, is no longer part of what is now the three-county Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area in northwest Arkansas.
Northwest Arkansas just lost 20,000 or so people.
The federal Office of Management & Budget dropped McDonald County from the official Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area. Mervin Jebaraj, the director of the Center for Business & Economic Research at the University of Arkansas’ Walton College of Business, dropped the bombshell at the Business Forecast Luncheon in Rogers the other day.
Well, it wasn’t much of a bombshell. Most in the audience of 1,200 seemed to think, “McDonald County is in northwest Arkansas?”
Of course it isn’t. It is a sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of Missouri just across the state line.
Jebaraj said the decision to drop McDonald from the MSA was made solely by the OMB based on community patterns. The Northwest Arkansas MSA is now Benton, Washington and Madison counties.
For scale, McDonald County had a few thousand more than 20,000 residents the last census, Jebaraj said. That’s about one-third of Springdale but still slightly more than Madison County.
The OMB’s criteria for outlying counties require 25 percent of McDonald’s residents to either work in the main counties of the MSA (i.e., Benton County or Washington County) or have 25 percent of the residents in the main counties work in McDonald. Jebaraj said most residents of McDonald work in McDonald and, obviously, Benton and Washington County residents aren’t working in Missouri in large numbers.
Jebaraj said having Madison County in the MSA was problematic at times because the state of Missouri didn’t seem to help the small county out that much. Remember, it took Arkansas politicians — heavy hitters like U.S. senators and representatives — to get the $25 million federal grant that will allow the 19-mile Bella Vista Bypass to be completed on Interstate 49. (To be fair, Missouri politicians were involved, too.)
“It makes it easier to work with Missouri,” Jebaraj said of the MSA reset.
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