University of Tennessee partners aid a dozen local governments in getting corrected decennial population counts.

A statewide count of Tennessee residents occurs just once every 10 years. So, when there are errors, a community may not receive its share of state and federal funds that are disbursed based on population for the next decade.

Fortunately, the U.S. Census Bureau offers a means to correct some errors, and this decade 17 Tennessee communities won challenges or reviews which increased their population reported in the 2020 Census.

This included the agency’s traditional “challenge” program that is aimed at correcting technical issues such as inaccurate corporate boundaries and population reported in the wrong jurisdiction. And this decade’s postcensal reviews were expanded to include a new program that corrected miscounted group-living facilities impacted by closures related to COVID-19.

Getting up to speed with the intricacies of those Census Bureau review programs and preparing the required documentation can be daunting for some smaller communities. That led the Tennessee State Data Center (TNSDC), housed at the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research, and the Municipal Technical Advisory Service (MTAS) at the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service, to partner in submitting cases for a dozen cities and towns.

The two groups worked together to engage communities that were identified as potentially having challenges and to work with officials in those cities and towns to file the reviews with the Census Bureau.

“We wanted to work with MTAS because their consultants are trusted by cities and towns across the state,” said Tim Kuhn, TNSDC Director. “Their connections and expertise made the process of gathering the required evidence and connecting with elected officials much easier than going at it alone.”

Ten Municipalities Prevail in 2020 Census Challenges

A total of 10 Tennessee cities and towns filed challenges, with most arising because the limits of the incorporated areas reported in the decennial census did not match the community’s adopted limits as of January 1, 2020.

The City of Cleveland filed the state’s first challenge early in 2022. Their corrections eventually netted a 423-person increase after numerous boundary tweaks were made.

That was followed by two West Tennessee communities, whose challenges earned the state’s largest revisions. Memphis’s big gain (+3,816 people) was primarily the result of an earlier annexation in the Southwind-Windyke area that was never added to the Census Bureau’s boundary files. Whiteville’s 1,958-person increase came because a prison’s population was incorrectly reported as being outside the town boundary.

The balance of the challenge cases came from the joint TNSDC and MTAS effort and was mainly focused on small municipalities whose boundaries were not current in the census. The challenge process included submitting ordinances, maps and lists of the affected addresses,  which the Census Bureau then used to reconcile the counts.

Though many of the corrections were small, the revenue changes can be impactful. The State of Tennessee shared an estimated $170 per resident in 2023, making a population increase of a few hundred people worth tens of thousands of dollars each year and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decade.