The Census Bureau released its 2010 data to a waiting country . . . but the numbers in Queens County simply do not add up!
There is simply no way that the most diverse county in the country added a mere 1,300 people. It added nearly that many languages spoken here in the past 10 years.
Mayor Michel Bloomberg said, "I’m not criticizing them [the Census Bureau], but it doesn’t make any sense . . . the idea that Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx recorded substantial increases, while Brooklyn only grew by 1.6 percent and Queens grew by a tenth of one percent, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Why should we care about the low numbers?
Federal and state funding is determined by these population numbers. Such a low count means that the city is less likely to get the resources it needs for various programs.
Recount you say?
Not an option . . . However, while the U.S. Census Bureau’s goal was to count everyone once, only once, and in the right place, there are historically a small percentage of cases where a wrong geographic boundary or coding of a housing unit was used to produce the official census population and housing counts for a local area.
There may also be cases where due to processing errors, the Census Bureau mistakenly duplicated or deleted living quarters that were identified during the census.
To adjudicate charges of undercounting or missed population, the Census Bureau has established a process by which elected officials may challenge their jurisdiction’s 2010 census count – called Count Question Resolution.
Write that down Mayor Mike!
Count Question Resolution will accept challenge submissions from governmental units – that means you Bloomberg, Beeps Helen Marshall and Marty Markowitz – beginning June 1.
All challenges must be received by the Census Bureau no later than June 1, 2013. The Census Bureau will not collect any additional data or conduct additional surveys during this challenge process. If a challenge results in a change, the Census Bureau will issue official revised counts to the affected governments.
These changes can be used by the governments for future programs that require official 2010 census data. They will also be used to calculate subsequent population estimates for that community.
Following the 2000 census, potential count problems were identified for 1,180 out of 39,000 jurisdictions – less than 3 percent of all governmental jurisdictions across the nation. The final 2000 CQR corrections resulted in a net gain in population of about 2,700 people. This amounts to about 1/1000th of one percent of the nation’s population of 281 million people counted in the 2000 census.
Putting it simply – We wuz robbed!
