[Talk-us] Alaska CPD boundaries

[Greg Troxel]

  The census bureau divided the unorganized borough into 11 census areas.
  These have no legal significance but serve to sub-divided the state into
  convenient parts. In spite of this they are in many ways like counties. I've
  tagged them the same as counties (admin_level=6) but I'm not convinced that
  this is the best tagging.

If they're just a census division, it seems wrong to call them boroughs
(treating them like counties with a different name).  Boroughs as
counties seem right - it's the way the state divides things less than a
state and more than a town.  The point of admin_level is government, and
census boundaries (for the sole convenience of the census bureau,
presumably) are not in any way governments.

I think the real question is whether the unorganized borough is really a
borough, or just a way to refer to land in the state not in a borough.
This would affect whether there was a boundary (multipolygon presumably)
for the unorganized borough.  Having read the wikipedia page, I'd argue
that the unorganized borough is to organized boroughs as unincorporated
areas are to towns, and thus should not have a boundary way.  Or if it
does, it should not have an admin_level tag, but some other tag.

  I'm not sure where the way showing the limit of the coastline boroughs
  should be. Currently it is an approximated offset coastline with digitizing
  artifacts. The options I see are

  (1) The 12 nautical mile limit (US territorial sea claims)

  (2) The 3 nautical mile limit (state submerged land limit, traditional
  territorial sea claims limit)

  (3) The coastline way

  (4) The existing crudely drawn inaccurate imported limit.

A very good question, and one I've been wondering about for
Massachusetts.  I think you'll have to look to state law (and perhaps
federal) to see whether the area of ocean between (3) and (2) and
between (2) and (1) are considered part of the borough.  I would expect
that (1) is the right answer for the state boundary.
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