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The pricey expenditure is warranted, Mayor Diane Marlin said,
because Urbana is losing several hundred thousand dollars in
state and federal funding every year because their recorded
population numbers were down by several thousand people in the
official 2020 census results.
“People don’t realize how much of a city’s revenue is related to
population, because that is how a lot of our revenue from the
state and federal governments is distributed,” Marlin said. “It
is one of those things where you don’t realize how important it
is until you suddenly lose it.”
About 55,000 students attend the University of Illinois at the
Urbana-Champaign campus. Many of them live in private rental
housing or in residence halls that are located in Urbana. The
students are counted as city residents, Marlin said.
In the Census year 2020, U of I shut down in-person learning on
campus in the middle of March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Two weeks later on April 1, when the 2020 Census got its
official start, several thousand students had left their
apartments and residence halls and did not get counted, Marlin
suspects.
“Once the official census maps and results came out, it was very
clear that the highest population drops were consistently on or
near the U of I campus,” Marlin said.
Urbana’s share of the local motor fuel tax and the state income
tax, and of federal funding for community development block
grants and other programs serving low-income populations, are
all dependent on population, Marlin said.
“Bottom line: We are losing $500,000 to $750,000 a year because
of what we believe is an artificial drop in the official
population,” she said.
The small Illinois communities of McDonough, Pingree Grove, and
Warrenville are also seeking partial 2020 census recounts. Those
municipalities have added new residential developments since
2010 that have boosted their populations, they maintain.
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