The 11 municipal districts are subdivisions delineated by law, but they no longer serve any governmental function; until 1978, each district elected its own commissioner, similar to the commissioners (mayors) in Guam. Nevertheless, late in the 1990 census process, the CNMI government informed the Census Bureau that the districts, though obsolete, were to be retained for the 1990 census, presumably for historical comparability and because they are the basis for defining Saipan’s four election districts. The Census Bureau will need to reexamine the districts for the 2000 census to determine whether they and their boundaries are still valid and/or appropriate; indeed, the CNMI government has asked the Census Bureau to provide assistance in relocating the boundaries from nonvisible lines to appropriate permanent, visible features for the 2000 census of Saipan Municipality. The obsolete districts for Rota and Tinian Municipalities may be replaced in each area by the current single election district, which is coextensive with the municipality; data for smaller geographic areas would be available by BGs and blocks, or combinations thereof.
The places in the CNMI, which the 1970 census incorrectly referred to as towns and villages, are CDPs. For the 1980 census, 11 places qualified as CDPs; that is, they had at least 300 people. There were 16 such places for the 1990 census. The CNMI was block-numbered for the first time for the 1990 census. To provide data for locally useful areas, the Census Bureau tried to delineate BGs that approximated the EDs that the TTPI had used for the 1973 census and the Census Bureau repeated, insofar as possible, for the 1980 census; the Census Bureau then worked with the CNMI’s Department of Commerce and Labor—which also delineated the CDPs and undertook the 1990 census—to review and refine these areas and then group them into statistically useful BNAs.
The agriculture and economic censuses report data for the CNMI and each municipality. Prior to the 1990 census of agriculture and the 1992 economic censuses, when the municipalities were not yet treated as the statistical equivalents of counties, the municipalities were identified as special geographic entities for the agriculture census and as the statistical equivalents of places for the economic censuses.
