Several Midwestern cities to be re-counted in census

Four years after the last census, almost a dozen small communities in the Midwest are going to be counted again in hopes of getting a new grocery store or more state funding to build roads, fire stations and parks.

Eleven small cities in Illinois and Iowa are the only municipalities so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau for a second count of their residents in 2024 and 2025, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. The first year in which the special censuses can be conducted is 2024.

With one exception, city officials don’t think the numbers from the original count were inaccurate. It’s just that their populations have grown so fast in three years that officials believe they are leaving state funding for roads and other items on the table by not adding the extra growth to their population totals. Some also believe that new results from a second count will open up their community to new businesses by showing they have crossed a population threshold.

“We anticipate a significant increase in population from the special census, particularly given that we have had a record buildingpermit year,” said Marketa Oliver, city administrator for Bondurant, Iowa, a city of more than 8,700 residents in mid-2022, the last year figures are available, which is an 18% increase over the count in 2020.

Officials in Norwalk, Iowa, hope the second count shows the city has surpassed 15,000 people, since that is the threshold typically used as a rule of thumb in commercial real estate for when a community can support a business like a supermarket.

Unlike the 2020 census, the second counts won’t be used for redrawing political districts or determining how many congressional seats each state gets. Instead, they will be used to determine how much the communities will get in state funding that often is calculated by population size.