Rhode Island/Cities and towns Discussion View history

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Municipalities

As with many other states in the New England region, Rhode Island is divided into 39 municipalities that handle all local governance. These municipalities have clearly defined borders, and should be considered the default city for any roads or Places within those borders. There are four sources for official address data in RI, listed below in order of preference:

  1. GIS - Interactive maps displaying lot information for each address in a municipality
  2. VGSI - Vision Government Solutions, Inc is a software company that some municipalities use to record information about land parcels under their jurisdiction. This information is then made available to the public for free. NOTE: VGSI also offers interactive maps for certain towns (marked with a *), but they require Mircosoft Silverlight in order to run, which is only available on Internet Explorer 11 and older browsers.
  3. NERG - Northeast Revaluation Group, LLC is another evaluation company contracted out by municipalities to record land parcel information. They cover the municipalities not covered by VGSI.
  4. PLAT - These are static images of PLAT maps pulled from the town's archives. Should only be referenced as a last resort.


Villages

Rhode Island municipalities can be further subdivided into named villages; though often times, the boundaries of these villages are not as clearly defined. In most cases, we can refer to ZIP code boundaries to determine village locations. Since mailing addresses are the only way for residents to know which village they reside in, only village names that are recognized by the US Postal Service as the default city of a given standard ZIP code should be mapped. Those villages are:

  • Ashaway (02804)
  • Bradford (02808)
  • Carolina (02812)
  • Chepachet (02814)
  • Clayville (02815)
  • Greene (02827)
  • Greenville (02828)
  • Harrisville (02830)
  • Hope (02831)
  • Hope Valley (02832)
  • Kenyon (02836)
  • Kingston (02881)
  • Manville (02838)
  • Mapleville (02839)
  • North Scituate (02857)
  • Oakland (02858)
  • Pascoag (02859)
  • Riverside (02915)
  • Rumford (02916)
  • Saunderstown (02874)
  • Shannock (02875)
  • Slatersville (02876)
  • Slocum (02877)
  • Wakefield (02879)
  • West Kingston (02892)
  • Wood River Junction (02894)
  • Wyoming (02898)

For roads in these areas, the village should be the primary City name, with the municipality the village is contained in listed as an alternate City name. To determine the boundaries of these villages, refer to a ZIP Code map or use the RI Cities Overlay script in WME.

Census Designated Places

When the original Waze basemap was first introduced, it utilized Census Designated Places (CDPs) to determine the boundaries for cities on the Waze map. These CDPs are arbitrary areas defined by the U.S. Census Bureau for the purpose of statistical analysis, and are redefined with each new census every 10 years. As a result, these named areas are not suitable for defining city boundaries in Rhode Island. If a road has a city name that is not in the above lists, then it's probably a CDP name and should be changed.


Official Rhode Island policy is that Census Designated Places should not be mapped

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