maps showing voting district boundaries and the features those boundaries followed. The test of this project was successful; the Census Bureau found it could add most additional features requested by the States to the FCMs. The States were able to provide an acceptable level of verification for the features they wanted added, and they found the Census Bureau willing to accept nearly all of the suggested features as block boundaries.
In April 1985, the Census Bureau announced Phase 1 of the 1990 Redistricting Data Program, the Block Boundary Suggestion Project (BBSP). Thirty-eight States and the District of Columbia participated in the BBSP. (In addition, the Census Bureau devised a similar program called the Block Boundary Definition Project for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.) Using guidelines provided by the Census Bureau, participating States began the task of collecting their voting district information from local officials such as county clerks and election offices. Acknowledging the practical and technical reasons for the Census Bureau’s requirement that visible features be used as census block boundaries, many States went a step further and initiated legislation requiring that all voting districts within their States follow visible features.
States divided their workload into whole counties and used the Census Bureau’s internal work schedule to set their own priorities. With the help of the RO geographic staff, States compared their block boundary suggestions with the FCMs before the ROs sent the FCMs to the Census Bureau’s Field Digitizing Sites; this was done to ensure that the Census Bureau could include the States’ suggestions in the map updates it was entering in the TIGER data base for use in the 1990 census. Staff from many States visited the Census Bureau’s ROs to review the FCMs. After one or two visits, State staff usually could review 16 or more counties in a day. States that were using the U.S. Geological Survey’s 7.5 minute quadrangle maps as their cartographic base could expedite their review, as this was the base map being used by the Census Bureau for the FCM program. For cases in which local officials had drawn their voting district boundaries
