OVERVIEW

The political boundary datalayer is a 1:25,000 scale datalayer containing the boundaries of the 351 communities (cities and towns) in Massachusetts. The seaward boundary of coastal communities has been defined at mean high water in this datalayer. In ArcSDE are the layers TOWNS_POLY and  TOWNS_ARC. Also available is the layer TOWNS_POLYM, which contains multi-part polygons, or one record for each of the 351 municipalities. This layer may be useful in analyses using 1-to-1 joins on the TOWN_ID field. Note that the 351 communities are the official municipal names, not including "villages" or other sections of towns. The Secretary of State's office has prepared a web page listing the Unincorporated and Unofficial Names of Massachusetts Communities. Also see the List of Town Numbers and Names and Towns Index Map, useful when downloading data distributed by town or as a general reference. MassGIS has developed a newer, more accurate layer based on surveyed town corner points, Community Boundaries (Towns) from Survey Points.

This datalayer, except the coastline, was digitized by MassGIS from a set of stable based film prints of the 1:25,000 7.5' quadrangles purchased from the USGS by the Massachusetts Dept. of Public Works. The coastline was taken from the USGS 1:100,000 hydrography DLG database. It was selected visually and appended to the digitized town boundaries.

The TOWNS_POLYM layer was created by dissolving the 631 polygons in TOWNS_POLY on TOWN_ID, producing a multi-part polygon feature class with 351 features, one for each municipality.

Items in the polygon attribute table:
 

ITEM NAME		WIDTH		TYPE		ALTERNATE NAME		Contents
TOWN_ID		3		I		MASSGIS-TOWN-COD		MassGIS Town-ID Code (alphabetical, 1-351)
TOWN		21		C		TOWN-NAME		City or town name
FIPS_STCO		5		I		FIPS-ID		Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) State/County Code
CCD_MCD		3		C		CENSUS-TOWN-CODE		US Census Town Code
FIPS_PLACE		5		C		FIPS-TOWN-CODE		Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Town Code
POP1980		6		I		CEN-POPULATION80		US Census Town Population: 1980
POP1990		6		I		CEN-POPULATION90		US Census Town Population: 1990
POP2000		6		I		CEN-POPULAT2000		US Census Town Population: 2000
POPCH80_90		5		I		POPCHANGE_80-90		Population change, 1980-1990
POPCH90_00		5		I		POPCHANGE_90-00		Population change, 1990-2000
FOURCOLOR		1		I				Codes (1,2,3,4) allowing shading of all towns using 4 symbols (based on four-color theorem, where no adjacent polygons have same symbol)
TYPE		2		C				C = City, T = Town, TC = Town with City form of government
ISLAND		1		I				Polygon is (1) / is NOT (0) an island - many towns are composed of many polygons
FIPS_MCD		8		I		FIPS+CEN-TOWN-CO		FIPS State & County & Census Town Code concatenated
FIPS_COUNTY		3		I		COUNTY-CODE		FIPS County only code

The layer's arc attribute table contains an item added called OUTLINE, which enables differentiation of line type (e.g. dashed lines inside the state and solid for the outside). OUTLINE codes are:     1 = Interstate boundaries   17 = Internal boundaries (a dashed line in the MassGIS default lineset SW16)     4 = Coastline ARC/INFO Annotation has been added to the coverage. Level 1 places town names within the town boundaries while levels 2 and 3 place annotation along town boundaries.

The following tables may be joined to the Massachusetts Towns polygon layers on the TOWN_ID field:

• TOWNS_POLY_AREACODE [download dBASE file as self-extracting .exe] stores telephone area codes for each municipality and reflects the addition of four new "overlay" codes in Massachusetts which took effect on April 2, 2001. For more information on the Commonwealth's area codes, see Verizon's Area Codes Lookup Web page.
  

ITEM NAME		Contents
TOWN_ID		Town ID - Relates to TOWN_ID in TOWNS_POLY and TOWNSSURVEY_POLY attribute tables
AREACODE		Town Area Code (413, 508/774, 617/857, 781/339, 978/351)

• TOWNS_POP [download dBASE file as self-extracting .exe] stores population estimates for each city and town, as of July 1, from 2000 to 2007. Data are from the U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division (see http://www.census.gov/popest/cities/SUB-EST2007-5.html).
  

ITEM NAME		Contents
TOWN_ID		Town ID - Relates to TOWN_ID in TOWNS_POLY and TOWNSSURVEY_POLY attribute tables
JULY1_2000		Population estimate on July 1, 2000
JULY1_2001		Population estimate on July 1, 2001
JULY1_2002		Population estimate on July 1, 2002
JULY1_2003		Population estimate on July 1, 2003
JULY1_2004		Population estimate on July 1, 2004
JULY1_2005		Population estimate on July 1, 2005
JULY1_2006		Population estimate on July 1, 2006
JULY1_2007		Population estimate on July 1, 2007

• TOWNS_POLY_UTILITIES stores providers for Cable, Electricity and Natural Gas service. See the Public Service Utility Providers page for details and data download.
  
  
• TOWNS_POLY_MWRATOWN is no longer distributed. See the new MWRA Water/Sewer Service Areas layer for this infomation.

MassGIS maintians this datalayer. Plans are underway to replace the USGS source linework with linework developed from survey coordinates of town corners. In addition, a 1:5,000 coastline would added to the revised layer.

The FOURCOLOR item was added to the attribute table in March 2002.

In August 2002, the TYPE item was added, based on information available from a map on the Secretary of State's Web site (http://www.state.ma.us/sec/cis/cispdf/ma_city_town.pdf). In addition, the TOWN attribute value for Gay Head was changed to "GAY HEAD (AQUINNAH)" to reflect that town's name change to Aquinnah. MassGIS will keep the TOWN-ID as 104 so that the existing numbering scheme will remain intact.

In October 2002, the attribute table was modified to include population figures (total and change) based on the 2000 U.S. Census. Also at this time the arcs were modified to include OUTLINE code 4 and to correct a small section of the Florida-Savoy border.

Also see the Community Boundaries (Towns) Without Coast datalayer and the most accurate town boundary layer Community Boundaries (Towns) from Survey Points.

Last Updated 7/14/2008
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