Aurora is further delaying a special census originally planned to start earlier this year that was postponed by the federal government.
The 2020 decennial census showed that Aurora had a population of around 180,000, down from 197,000 in 2010 — but city officials have disputed those numbers, arguing that the city’s population is actually closer to the levels found in the 2010 census.
The perceived undercount, city officials have said, is costing the city millions of dollars in lost tax revenue each year.
Last summer, the Aurora City Council approved an agreement with the U.S. Census Bureau to pay $1 million for a special census that the city hoped would count additional residents. City officials previously said that the special census would only need to find around 1,000 extra residents to pay for itself.
The city loses about $4.3 million a year in federal and state funding due to the perceived undercount, which would mean a total of $43 million lost in the full 10 years between 2020 and 2030, officials have said.
The census’ self-response period was originally set to begin Feb. 3 and end March 7, when the door-to-door count would have started. The city had been promoting the Feb. 3 start date for months and had even set up a kick-off event plus a number of neighborhood events, according to past reporting.
The day before the kick-off event was planned, officials at the U.S. Census Bureau told the city that the special census had been postponed awaiting the installment of new federal leadership. That forced the city to cancel its events and put the whole process on pause.
Now, months after the special census was originally set to begin, and after the election of a new mayor, the city has been given an updated start date for the special census: Aug. 1.
For many reasons, that new start date could put the city at risk of a further undercount, which would mean even less state and federal funding, Aurora’s new Chief of Staff Shannon Cameron told the Aurora City Council at a Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday. So, city staff recommended further delaying the special census, potentially until next year, by re-entering the queue of cities requesting a special census that Aurora currently sits at the top of.
No formal vote was taken at the meeting, but most alderman appeared to support staff’s recommendation. On Thursday, Aurora Mayor John Laesch confirmed to The Beacon-News that the city plans to move forward with re-entering the queue.
If the city accepted the new start date, which would have the online self-response period beginning on July 1, it would have less than a month to get the word out to the community and build public trust, Cameron said at the Tuesday meeting.
After Aug. 1, residents would no longer be able to take the online survey and could only be counted by talking to federal workers who come door-to-door, she said.
That presents another issue, according to Cameron. She said many community and faith-based organizations that work with the city’s Hispanic population have told city staff that the special census would not be successful and have advised the city not to go forward with it because of how hard these organizations have worked to inform people not to open their doors or speak to anyone working for the federal government, given fears over the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
A lot of people also do not feel comfortable giving their data over to the federal government right now since some federal data previously kept separate, such as tax data kept by the IRS, is now being turned over to immigration enforcement, Cameron said.
In a separate issue, the city has to recruit 53 people for the special census who will be trained and act as federal workers, according to Cameron. She said that, even with all the time to prepare, the previous administration was only able to find 22 qualified applicants — and although some of those people may still be interested, the city would only have until Aug. 1 to recruit all the rest.
While not all of the city would need to be counted under the special census, only specific areas identified when it was applied for, those 53 workers would only have until the end of the year to count everyone within those areas who did not respond to the online portion of the census, Cameron said.
That’s because the Census Bureau has a special waiver that allows them to hire people despite the current federal hiring freeze, she said, but that waiver ends at the end of the year.
Ald. Mike Saville, 6th Ward, asked if the city would be able to hire its own employees to help, and Cameron said they could — but those city employees could only help people fill out the online portion of the special census, which would only be a month-long.
Plus, the city previously had additional support including a Harvard fellow set to help with the special census, but it no longer has access to many of those people, Cameron said. And, the city’s new leadership is still trying to get caught up to speed on everything, she said.
There are also concerns around language and literacy barriers, which the city originally planned to address through a partnership with the schools — but school is out for the summer, which would make it harder for that partnership to pay off if the city accepted the proposed new start date, according to Cameron.
In addition to these and other concerns about the Aug. 1 start date, city staff said there were also positive reasons to delay.
One is that the city could redraw the map of where the special census would recount to focus primarily on areas with new growth, basically guaranteeing that it would find new residents, rather than focusing mostly on areas that may have been undercounted in the 2020 census, Aurora GIS Manager Tim Shields told the Committee of the Whole on Tuesday.
Plus, with the delay, more of the developments currently under construction would be complete, meaning more residents to be counted, he said.
The money Aurora has already paid towards the special census would not be lost if the city re-enters the queue, according to Cameron.
However, she said there is no guarantee that, next year, the Census Bureau will be able to hire any new employees to support a special census since its hiring freeze waiver expires at the end of this year.
Aurora would also be losing potentially another year of decreased federal and state revenue because of an under-counted population.
Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, said he was in favor of the delayed special census so the city would have more time to prepare. While the city may not see much return on this investment in the short-term, it would lay the groundwork for the 2030 census, benefiting the city in the long-term, he said.
Most other aldermen also agreed with staff’s recommendation of delaying the census, but Ald. Patty Smith, 8th Ward, said the $4.3 million the city would be losing by delaying a year is “a lot of money to let go and not try to fight for.” She instead recommended going forward with starting the special census on the date given by the Census Bureau or asking for a short extension.
Saville agreed with Smith on the condition that the city hires more people or asks city employees if they would want to work overtime to support the effort.
Starting the special census with the Census Bureau’s new date was one of the options Cameron presented at Tuesday’s meeting, as was asking the bureau to give the city a slight delay. She also presented the option of backing out of the special census altogether and getting back $900,000 from the federal government.
On Thursday, Laesch told The Beacon-News that the city asked to see if the Census Bureau would just delay the special census start date, but that request was denied. The city is planning to take staff’s recommendation of re-entering the queue with an updated map, he said.
An email sent by the Census Bureau to the city, shared with The Beacon-News by Laesch, said there were no other available days to start the special census in 2025. Census Bureau officials in the email gave the city the option to either take the Aug. 1 date, terminate the agreement and get unused funds back or “remain paused” — and Laesch said the city chose to “pause” the special census in response to the email.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
