WILMINGTON – Community advocate Evelyn Bryant was planning a late October event to help New Hanover County residents complete the 2020 Census when the U.S. Census Bureau announced last week it was ceasing field operations.
President of the YWCA of the Lower Cape Fear and member of New Hanover County’s the Complete Count Committee (CCC), Bryant already organized a voter registration and census drive earlier in the year and a drive-thru event where people could fill out the census in their cars. As the deadline neared, she was trying to reach residents that are historically undercounted, particularly in the Black community.
Now, activists like Bryant fear these hard-to-count communities, including Black and Hispanic residents and rural areas will be undercounted. It could cost the region millions in needed federal funding.
“Imagine we don’t get this funding and something like [Hurricane] Florence comes up again?” Bryant said. “I don’t see how we survive.”
The Trump administration ended field operations Thursday after a Supreme Court decision over ruled a lower court’s ruling that kept the count open until the end of October. The decision came after the administration argued the U.S. Census Bureau needed time to meet a year-end deadline to report the data to Congress.
The Constitution directs the federal government to count every person in every state every 10 years, irrespective of gender, race or wealth. The data is used to determine congressional seats and how to spend $1.5 trillion in federal funding. In North Carolina, the census allocates slightly less than $44 billion in federal funding. It also determines redistricting for state and federal legislative seats.
But the census is a lot more than a mechanism to allocate funding. It is the statistical bedrock on which federal programs are built. The country’s poverty threshold and consumer price index are based on census results. Programs ranging from food stamps to transportation projects to education funding stems from data gathered every decade. The data is also used to earmark areas for additional help like opportunity zones — designed to offer tax breaks to developers working in economically disadvantaged areas — and medically underserved areas where doctors get incentives to work.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this week 66.8% of American households self-responded to the census, with 63.3% of North Carolina homes responding, putting the state in 36th place. Minnesota was in first place with a 75% self-responded rate.
New Hanover County had a 64% response rate, lower than the 2010 response rate of 68.5% and well short of its goal of 80%. Compared to other counties in the region, New Hanover performed well. The rest of the counties in the region barely broke 50%, with Columbus County only getting a 52% response rate.
“The New Hanover County and City of Wilmington Complete Count Committee worked diligently over the last year, including when the coronavirus pandemic cancelled many of the in-person events we’d planned to promote the Census, to try to get every resident accurately counted,” said Tim Buckland, intergovernmental affairs coordinator for New Hanover County. “To that end, specific outreach to historically undercounted communities was conducted, including providing the public with computers at county-owned libraries, to take the census and make available county-owned tablets so residents could conveniently take the census on the spot. We hope the work of the committee, which spanned 13 months, results in an accurate count and that the shortened deadline does not result in an undercounting.”
Census workers started going door-to-door in August and had limited time to visit more than a million-and-a-half households statewide. Covid-19 also limited in-person outreach.
“Because of COVID, there was just so much people could do,” Bryant said. “Originally, we had a big roll out. When COVID hit, all of that disappeared.”
Some of New Hanover County’s lowest-reporting tracts are in historically under-counted communities and likely benefit the most from the programs informed by the census. Take tract 111 (Southside, Dawson, Mears, 8th). 50% of the residents there live below the poverty line and the tract is designated an opportunity zone. More than 60% of residents in 111 responded to the 2010 census, but only 47.7 percent responded in 2020. Tract 115.04 (along 133, Castle Hayne, Skippers Corner) is more rural and saw a 74.8% response rate in 2010, but was down to 64.6% in 2020.
Bryant said going door-to-door in the Black community in particular was important to break down the stigma of sharing personal information.
“People don’t understand the importance of the census,” she said. “We don’t really want to share what is going on in our household.”
Velva Jenkins, director of the YWCA Lower Cape Fear and a CCC member, said volunteers and census workers needed a bit more time to ensure everyone is counted.
“There are a lot of things that have made people uneasy,” Jenkins said. “People don’t know who to believe anymore. They don’t know who to trust. I can understand that, especially those who may not have the right resources to know what is true and what is not.”
The issue isn’t just in the Cape Fear. Paul Ong, a former census bureau advisor and director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, said in an email to ABC News there are “huge” gaps in the data nationwide.
“There are enormous political and economic implications from a racially biased census counted,” he wrote. “Marginalized populations will be further disenfranchised and disproportionately left out for public funds and services.”
Last week’s court ruling defied recommendations by the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and the American Statistical Association. They pointed out many households were displaced by natural disasters, and Covid-19 made canvassing difficult. Tens of thousands of houses were missed in California and Oregon because of wildfires, according to news reports, and almost 300,000 were missed in Alabama, Florida and Louisiana due to hurricanes.
The only logical choice was to extend the deadline and make sure everyone is counted.
“When the weather isn’t right, we postpone the launching of rockets into space,” the Census Scientific Advisory Committee wrote. “The same should be true of the decennial enumeration, the results of which will impact apportionment, redistricting, funding decisions, legal mandates and regulatory uses of decennial Census data over the next decade.”
