Alabama to Lose Millions of Federal Dollars Through Census Undercount

Alabama’s population will be undercounted in the 2010 census, says Annette Jones Watters, manager of the Alabama State Data Center at The University of Alabama.

“So what, you ask?” Watters says. “It means millions of lost dollars in federal domestic assistance for our state over the coming decade.”

And if past experience means anything, some of the most unresponsive will be people who don’t own their own homes, college students, people of minority races, high school dropouts, people living in poverty, and people whose first language is not English, Watters predicts. And those are often the people who need the federal assistance most.

“In both 1990 and 2000, Alabama’s official census count was under the actual number of people in the state,” says Watters, an astute Census scholar. “A lot of people did not fill out and return their census forms.  The U.S. Census Monitoring Board estimates that in 2000 Alabama had nearly 54,000 more people than were officially tallied—31,000 over the age of 18 and 23,000 under the age of 18—for an undercount rate of 1.2 percent,” Watters said.

Watters says the undercounts were not spread equally over the entire state. Jefferson County, a county in desperate need of financial help, has the biggest pockets of people who fit these descriptions.

“Jefferson County is Alabama’s largest county, and it has the most of everything – rich, poor, white, black, young, old. The biggest county has the most of everything, good and bad.  Jefferson County had Alabama’s biggest undercount rate in the last census. The federal government estimates that Jefferson County had 10,500 more people than were officially accounted for in 2000.”

Appropriations for federal dollars are made on the basis of the actual count, not estimates.

“The largest federal programs that depend, in part, on census data to distribute funds around the country are Title I grants to local education agencies, foster care, community development block grants, WIC (food) assistance, social services block grants, basic support for rehabilitation services, employment and training programs, child care programs and vocational education,” Watters says.

People who frequently don’t answer the census are those who are eligible for federal programs. Alabama will have more federal money from these programs for people who need help if everybody fills and returns a 2010 census form.

The Brookings Institution estimated in 2008 that Alabama got $1,269.33 of federal domestic assistance each year for each person counted in the census. Fifty-four thousand uncounted Alabamians prevented millions of dollars from coming to the state, money that went to other states.