By Philip Sean Curran
FREEHOLD – The population of Monmouth County has been declining gradually during the past decade, ahead of next year’s census that will determine Congressional representation for the state and federal funding decisions.
Representatives of the U.S. Census Bureau were on hand at the Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders meeting June 13 for an overview of the decennial population count that has been taking place since the 18th century. In 2020 the government will look to count everyone living in a country that had about 4 million people in 1790 compared to more than 300 million today.
Mailings from the Census Bureau will go out in March 2020, with the agency collecting the official counts by September, said Ryan Edwards, a partnership specialist with the bureau.
In his remarks to the freeholders Edwards emphasized that it was critical to get an accurate population count, given how the data is used. Population determines how many seats states hold in the U.S. House of Representatives. Edwards said that in 2010, New Jersey lost one of its House seats, going from 13 to 12, due to undercounting.
“So our big push this census and every census is the consequences of not having a correct count,” he said. “We have one chance to get this right. And those consequences will last 10 years after that.”
Redistricting of congressional seats will start taking place in the spring of 2021 based on the census data, Edwards said.
He also touched on how an accurate count is important when it comes to disbursing $675 billion in federal funds, also based on census data.
The population of Monmouth County was 630,380 in 2010, according to the census that year. But that total fell to an estimated 621,354 as of last July, according to the Census Bureau.
Overall, New Jersey’s population was estimated at 8.9 million people, up from 8.7 million in 2010. As a whole, the nation’s population was estimated at more than 327 million last year, up from nearly 309 million in 2010.
The Census Bureau also needs to hire people for temporary jobs, like census takers. “Most positions are anticipated to last several weeks,” the agency said on its website.
“And we try to hire locally,” Edwards said. “So if we know in certain communities in the Freehold area, we want to hire people that live in the Freehold area, so you’re going to knock on your neighbor’s door, not just a random federal employee going door to door.”
To be eligible to work for the Census Bureau, prospective employees must be at least 18 years old, a U.S. citizen and meet other criteria, the agency said.
Freeholder Lillian G. Burry said during the meeting that she had been a census counter 30 years ago. She said she and her sister had decided it was a “great way to make a little money.”
“And let me tell you,” she said, “that’s an experience, particularly if you’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood and you have dogs chasing you.”
Census Day is April 1, 2020. The public can respond to the census through the mail, by phone or on the internet, the Census Bureau has said.
The federal agency intends to have a complete count committee in Monmouth, Edwards said. The group will be made up of government officials and others, “to see what kind of tactics we can use to get into areas that are typically low response rates,” he said.
Edwards said the census aims to count everyone, citizens or not, as well as the homeless. The federal government has proposed putting a citizenship question on the census form, although that issue faces a legal challenge currently on the Supreme Court’s docket; a decision in the case is expected by the end of June.
