OVERVIEW

The U.S. Congressional Districts datalayer reflects the U.S. House of Representatives voting district boundaries as established for the 108th Congress. These boundaries took effect in January 2003. The name of the statewide datalayers are CONGRESS108_POLY and CONGRESS108_ARC. These layer replaces the old layer named CONGRESS, which represented boundaries established for the 103rd Congress.

Staff at the Massachusetts Senate developed this layer with its contracor, Caliper Corp. (Newton, MA) using Maptitude for Redistricting software. MassGIS appended the 1:100,000 coastline and state outline and added the Representatives' name and party attributes.

The CONGRESS108_POLY attribute table has the following items:

ITEM NAME		WDTH / TYPE		DESCRIPTION
CD108		2 / I		Unique number for each district
REP_FIRST		16 / C		First name of representative
REP_LAST		16 / C		Last name of representative
REP_PARTY		2 / C		Political party of representative (D = Democrat)
REP		25 / C		Rep.'s full name and party
URL		50 / C		World Wide Web address for Representative

In the CONGRESS108_ARC attribute table, the item OUTLINE is coded as follows:

0 = internal district boundaries

1 = state

2 = coastline

MassGIS will update the layer as needed. In October 2007 the attributes for the 5th district were edited following the special election victory of Rep. Nicola S. Tsongas.

Last Updated 10/23/2007
EOEA Disclaimer | Privacy Policy