Some towns get funding boost from Census Bureau corrections

After the U.S. Census Bureau released its first round of official 2020 population corrections in January, many states and cities still await action on the bulk of their counting issues and the funding shortfalls those mishaps can cause.

Early winners are those areas where the census had clear technical problems — where mapping issues or uncertain boundaries misplaced prisons in Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee, adding their populations incorrectly to nearby areas.

For instance, Whiteville, Tennessee, had almost 2,000 people restored to its count, a 75% increase from the census count of 2,606, after the population of a prison was added back from a nearby area to which it was mistakenly attributed in 2020, said Timothy Kuhn, director of the Tennessee State Data Center in Knoxville.

The boost will help the town with an estimated $167 per person in lost annual state funding that is doled out based on population, or an additional $327,000 a year, according to state data-sharing estimates.

But the biggest cases in the largest cities are still pending, especially affecting areas with larger populations of racial minorities.

The Census Bureau’s new corrections show changes approved under the Count Question Resolution process in areas within Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.

Other changes are still under review, including some in those same states, and also in California, Florida,  Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, according to Census Bureau records showing 32 total cases filed so far.

Another 23 cases were filed in a similar program for counts of institutions, such as college dorms and nursing homes, but results have not yet been published for those.

There continues to be confusion in many cases, such as in Yuma County, Arizona. There, early results in the count corrections show the town of Somerton gaining six people.

But the city of Yuma was told only that seven of its 20 challenges were approved, not which cases or how much it would affect the population; the city won’t find that out until 2024, State Demographer Jim Chang said.

That’s typical of other communities with challenges to census counts that have been approved but not yet published, said Connecticut-based census consultant Terri Ann Lowenthal.

“The Census Bureau needs to be more transparent about this,” Lowenthal said. “Localities put a lot of effort into reviewing and compiling evidence about undercounts, and they are extremely frustrated when the response is a resolution letter that gives them an outcome with no explanation.”

The Census Bureau declined to respond on the record but pointed to public documents explaining reasons for withholding details in some previous count reviews: to preserve confidentiality rules for small areas and individual institutions meant to protect privacy.

States and municipalities have until June 30 to submit cases to the Count Question Resolution program or to another program to review counts of institutions such as prisons and college dorms, called Post-Census Groups Quarters Review.

Census takers faced considerable confusion about how to count people in institutions when many students went home, and nursing homes closed to visitors at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020.

The biggest cases in large cities such as Austin, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Tempe, Arizona, are still pending. Milwaukee is seeking an increase of almost 16,000, which is the bulk of a population decrease of about 18,000 recorded in 2020 compared with 2010.

The city has evidence to support its claim that some housing units were missed, and others were mistakenly listed as vacant, likely because people living there distrusted census takers and did not answer mail and door-to-door follow-ups, said Jordan Primakow, senior government relations manager for Milwaukee.

The city doesn’t expect to succeed completely — the Census Bureau challenge programs don’t include revisiting vacancy decisions — but it’s important to note the reasons for the undercount anyway, Primakow said.

“It is very narrow, the criteria they’re willing to review,” he said.

Primakow added that the undercounting issues are typical of urban areas with large minority populations like Milwaukee, and the Census Bureau encouraged cities to submit information that could help in future counts, even if they can’t be fixed under current guidelines.

The Census Bureau acknowledged in a 2022 report that it undercounted Black residents by 3.3% and Latino residents by almost 5% in 2020.

“We’re going to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks,” he said. “We can’t just keep saying, ‘Hey, sorry, we undercounted minority groups again.’ At some point, we have to do something about it.”