Census 2020: Population counts for LI counties, villages expected out Thursday

Data that will provide demographic information on race and ethnicity and impact the estimated distribution of between $675 billion and $1 trillion to states and local governments annually is expected to be released Thursday.

The 2020 Census will detail population counts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, and of Long Island's nearly 300 hamlets and villages. Local population counts affect redistricting — legislatures use them to draw maps to reconfigure districts — and help determine how much funding goes to school districts and more than 100 other programs on Long Island.

"There are no do-overs. We can’t go back and redo the census. So the numbers that will be released on Thursday are the numbers we will have to use, whether there are quality concerns or not," said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Services at the Center for Urban Research, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

The release of 2020 data had been delayed for several months because of the coronavirus pandemic, which last year interrupted the Census Bureau's door-knocking campaign reaching out to people who had not answered the questionnaire.

The Census Bureau in April released the state population counts, which affect the number of congressional seats each state gets. New York State’s 2020 population was 20.2 million, a 4.2% increase over 2010, but it lost one congressional seat after other states in the South and West saw greater population gains.

"The next big use of census data, after deciding how many congressional seats each state gets, is how the districts for Congress and state legislatures, and eventually local town boards and town councils, will get … mapped out," Romalewski said.

Romalewski, who has consulted with 2020 Census committees on Long Island, said redistricting impacts people’s lives "even if they don’t want to pay attention to it." He said a community's political landscape is shaped by redistricting data, and that it also affects "how well their schools are funded and how well their child care and health care systems are running."

Some of the federal programs impacted by census data include Medicaid, Medicare Part B, Section 8 Housing, special education grants, the Childhood Health Insurance Program, the National School Lunch Program, Head Start/Early Head Start, foster care, in addition to infrastructure programs, and economic development, according to a 2019 report by the Office of the Nassau County Comptroller and the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island.

Details from the redistricting data also should provide insight into the accuracy of the census. For example, Romalewski said local leaders can evaluate the population count of their community by looking at building permit applications or postal records "that provide indications of whether a community's population has grown or not."

Romalewski said the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which provides information on a community's racial and ethnic characteristics, among other things, also can help gauge the accuracy of the decennial data.

An inaccurate census count can be felt in a community, according to the 2019 report by the Nassau County Comptroller and the Health and Welfare Council, which described what it called a 2010 undercount of children under age 5 in Wyandanch.

"The data collected showed that only 4% of the population was between ages 0-5, which was not an accurate count," the report said, and as a result the Wyandanch school district "was not prepared" for the number of children entering its schools.

"Thus, the Wyandanch school district had to rent space from neighboring Half Hollow Hills to accommodate the student body, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those dollars could have been spent on programs and resources for the students if census data had better represented the population and enabled the school district to prepare accordingly," the report said.

Thomas Wolf, senior counsel with the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said there was a "huge push" in 2020 to get the minority count up. He leads the school's Census Project, which advocated for an "accurate count."

"The concept of racial and ethnic undercounts comes from that body of data," he said of the Census Bureau's "post-enumeration survey," which is due out in 2022. "That will give us a fuller sense of which groups are overcounted and undercounted, and how many were missed entirely."

Wolf added, "Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans have historically suffered from undercounts. … Based on data we have now, it’s difficult to tell whether those gaps have been closed."

Lawrence C. Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, said the data, overall, is an important underpinning of research.

"We rely on census data for almost anything we do that requires statistical analysis of communities," he said. "It’s our mother’s milk. Without it, we are kind of taking stabs in the dark."

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie