Eagle County searching for an undercount in 2020 census

Eagle County and a number of other mountain communities are searching for errors in the 2020 census that analysts believe have resulted in a significant undercount of the rural population.

The decennial census provides an official population count every 10 years, a baseline number that helps inform the subsequent annual population estimates that impact federal and state funding allocation. Mountain towns are difficult to count under normal conditions, due to the constant mobility of the working and residential communities, but attempting to complete the count during the pandemic posed an even greater challenge than usual.

Mick Ireland, the former mayor of Aspen and a dedicated political analyst, raised warning signals for mountain communities when his comparative analysis of 2020 census data with existing housing and voter data revealed three census blocks in Pitkin County that were erroneously marked as having a population of zero. Ireland estimates that the combination of “zero blocks” and undercounted blocks has led to around 1,000 people in Pitkin County being left out of the census count entirely.

The only available method for challenging the census count is the Count Question Resolution (CQR) operation, which allows local governments to request that the Census Bureau review their boundaries or housing counts by block to correct geographical errors. While a full recount is not permissible, missing housing units are grounds for correction, and that is exactly what Ireland has discovered in his analysis of Pitkin County.

“When you see a marked decline, that’s usually a sign that they missed something,” Ireland said. “You don’t have a lot of scrap and not replace, and in our affordable housing program, no one is tearing anything down. So you look at the high affordable housing unit blocks and you see an undercount of units, and the undercount of units matches the decline in population.”

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Now, Eagle County is beginning a similar review process, going through the census results block by block to determine whether an undercount has occurred and needs to be addressed at a federal level. County Manager Jeff Schroll said that if they do find discrepancies that warrant appeal, it will help the county adapt its methodology for future population estimates to achieve more accurate results.

“The future population estimates are critical for nearly all local government and special districts to better anticipate everything from tax revenue, demands on water and wastewater service, school attendance, transit ridership, traffic planning and general land use discussions,” Schroll said. “Several jurisdictions also receive state and federal funding based on population estimates, both current and projected, and those dollars directly correlate to services we can provide, thus the need to make sure we have accurate counts.”

In his report on the undercount in Pitkin County, Ireland estimates that each uncounted person will cost the county $2,400 in federal funding, an estimate that he called “conservative” and could in reality be as high as $4,000. Going through the census results is tedious and time-consuming work, but Ireland is assured that the investment will pay for itself multiple times over if an undercount is discovered.

“I think Eagle County should do this, because you never know when you’re going to discover a zero block,” Ireland said. “The census can’t really defend a zero block, because a zero block says that buildings and people that are provably there don’t exist. One zero block would pay for everything you possibly could do.”

Counting in unprecedented conditions

Undercounting certain populations has been a regular problem in the decennial census process. To address this issue, Eagle County tasked a group called the Complete Count Committee with reaching traditionally undercounted populations in the 2020 census. Abby Dallmann, a special projects manager for the county, was assigned to work on the committee.

“The point of the Complete Count Committee was to try to reach populations that were traditionally undercounted from the 2010 census, like older adults, Latino residents, low-income residents, children,” Dallmann said. “We then worked with organizations that serve those populations … kind of tapping into their already established channels with census messaging.”

The committee went into 2020 with a set strategy for connecting with these populations, but had to adapt on the fly with the onset of the pandemic.

“It’s certainly not an understatement that it absolutely changed everything,” Dallmann said. “We had all sorts of in-person events planned and one-on-one engagement — knocking on folks’ doors to talk about why the census is important, neighbor-to-neighbor sort of outreach — and obviously we couldn’t do any of that.”

At the same time that they were trying to come up with new, pandemic-proof outreach strategies, Dallmann said that members of the committee, including herself, were being assigned to support emergency services, like securing and distributing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). She said that the team did its best to get the word out about the census, but having been on the inside of the process she knows that the probability of an undercount is high.

There are no available options for recounting populations that were missed, unless it involves missing housing units or a processing error on the side of the Census Bureau. While a Count Question Resolution will not address the outreach difficulties encountered by the Complete Count Committee during the pandemic, Dallmann said it is still important for the county to identify points of issue in the 2020 census to ensure that these errors are not repeated in 2030.

“If they weren’t counted in 2020, they just weren’t counted in 2020 — it doesn’t allow us to go back and provide new information,” Dallmann said. “For a place like Eagle County, where we know about a lot of these structural issues with the 2020 census, it doesn’t feel like a great remedy, but we still want to understand it.”

A long and tedious process

Eagle County is still at the very beginning of this process, and has around a year until the June 30, 2023, deadline to submit an official Count Question Resolution to the Census Bureau.

Dallmann is currently working with members of the county’s Geographic Information System Mapping (GIS) team to go through approximately 3,000 census blocks, searching for notable discrepancies. To make things more difficult, some of the block boundaries have changed between 2010 and 2020, which prevents 2010 census data from being directly comparable with that of 2020.

“I can’t just pull up the unique identifier for ‘Tract A, 2010’ and compare it to 2020, I have to check the boundaries of those tracts to make sure that they’re still the same area, and we have like 3,000 of them,” Dallmann said. “So that’s where we’re at now, is looking through tract by tract to identify the ones that are very different.”

As of now, the analysis has yet to turn up any notable miscounts. Dallmann said that all of the discrepancies thus far have been attributed to the altered block boundaries, but that they will continue looking until the county is confident with the count or ready to make an official appeal.

Eagle County will also be looking to surrounding governments in Pitkin, Summit and Garfield counties that are undertaking similar processes. None have submitted an official Count Question Resolution yet, but if the patterns that Ireland identified are replicated in other mountain towns, it could be in everyone’s best financial interest to complete the process while the opportunity for an appeal is still available.