We kick off the show talking about the fact that New Orleans is no longer a major city - at least according to the federal government. We keep into that theme in our conversation with former New Orleans Councilman and state Senator Jon Johnson. He’s running for Council District E, and we ask the question as a convicted felon, can he win? Johnson believes he can.We then talk about the big beautiful Bill, which reached its first hurdle of passage on Saturday night. Originally, it looks like it would cut Medicare Advantage. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy had proposed something along those lines, which would’ve affected half of all Medicare recipients. Darren Grubb joins us to let us know that those cuts did not make the final bill, and hopefully will not return and reconciliation. It is a triumph of grassroots lobbying.However, to our major topic of the day…New Orleans Metro ceases to be a major city, according to OMBBy Christopher TidmoreIt went unnoticed by most of the local media, but a federal agency has downgraded New Orleans from a major city to little more than a large town, and that has major implications for future government funding, business relocation, and economic development.Basically, the North Shore was robbed from the New Orleans Metro! During his tenure two decades ago, former St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis controversially changed the moniker in advertisements of his parish from “New Orleans’ North Shore” to “Louisiana’s North Shore”, trying to break the mental metro association of the Causeway connection. It took 20 years, but a federal agency says the numbers now argue for exactly that.Quite simply, the population of the New Orleans metropolitan area was reduced from 1,237,748 to 962,165 by the stoke of a pen, since less than a quarter of North Shore residents now commute to the South Shore for their jobs.For the last 70 years, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has maintained a set of consistent statistical definitions for metropolitan regions of the United States to enhance the value of data provided by federal statistical agencies. The current rules are published in the Federal Register and are used to consistently define metro areas across the country.Starting with data released for 2023, the metropolitan statistical area (MSA), anchored by New Orleans — officially, the New Orleans–Metairie MSA — no longer includes St. Tammany Parish. Following a 2020 update published by the federal government and implemented this year, the New Orleans–Metairie MSA now covers seven parishes: Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and St. James. Additionally, a new Slidell–Mandeville–Covington MSA has been created, which consists only of St. Tammany Parish.Why have these official definitions changed? As the New Orleans Data Center explained, “The short answer is that a smaller portion of workers who live in St. Tammany are commuting to work in Orleans, Jefferson, and other parishes on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. This smaller portion no longer meets the criteria for St. Tammany to be included in Metro New Orleans. For a longer answer, keep reading below where we run down the details.  As a result of the change, the new official population of Metro New Orleans is lower than you might recall. According to the Census Bureau, the population of Metro New Orleans was 962,165 in 2023. If St. Tammany were included, the population under the old 8-parish definition would be 1,237,748 in 2023. The massive discrepancy between these two numbers is overwhelmingly driven by the official removal of St. Tammany’s resident population from the total rather than by population loss in the individual metro parishes. The bottom line is that, going forward, the official estimate will reflect a 7-parish region of under 1 million, not an 8-parish region of over 1.2 million. Without St. Tammany, basic measures of Metro New Orleans’ demographic and economic makeup will also change.”The OMB had previously classified St. Tammany as an “outlying county” of the New Orleans–Metairie MSA. Its two urban areas around Mandeville–Covington and around Slidell now stand as geographically separate and distinct from the larger urban area on the south shore. Previously, more than 25 percent of St. Tammany residents who work commuted to the six “central counties” on the south shore, meeting the criteria to be part of the New Orleans–Metairie MSA.For the last major update in 2010, which used data collected from 2006-2010, 26.2 percent of St. Tammany’s workers were commuting to the south shore. In the new estimates used for OMB’s latest major update in 2020, which use data collected from 2016-2020, this portion had fallen to 22.5 percent. The 25 percent commuting threshold is no longer met. Further, St. Tammany’s two urban areas have sufficient population to define the parish as a “central county” in a new MSA, deemed the Slidell–Mandeville–Covington MSA. As the Data Center explanined, “Because St. Tammany’s jobs have grown at an even faster pace than its population, the ratio of jobs to population has increased, from 232 jobs for every 1,000 residents in 1990 to 346 jobs for every 1,000 residents in 2023. The job-population ratio in St. Tammany remains lower than in Orleans and Jefferson (and Plaquemines, St. James, and St. Charles). But unlike in St. Tammany, the jobs-to-population ratio in Orleans and Jefferson is lower than it was during the early 2000s, before Hurricane Katrina. Altogether, these measures track a relativeshift in metro area jobs to St. Tammany Parish that has outpaced the shift in population, making it more likely for residents of St. Tammany to find jobs located in St. Tammany.”

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