Today is Sunday. It’s my first day of the 2006 National League of Cities (NLC)Congressional Cities Conference. The conference actually started yesterday with pre-conference meetings and seminars all day. Councilmember Sherry Butcher was here for that. I came in last night. I flew into Dulles Airport while my bags flew into Reagan National Airport. We eventually met up late last night, so it ended well.
I attended my first meeting of the day this afternoon. It was a presentation and discussion about the census. The speakers were Mr. Charles Kincannon, Director, U.S. Census Bureau and Dr. Edward Hudgins, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute.
Mr. Kincannon told us about the upcoming American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS will replace the Census Bureau’s traditional “long form” in which it asks respondants questions about such things as commuting times, how much you spend on electricity in a year, and how many toilets you have in your home. The ACS marks the Census Bureau’s first major step into national “sampling”. That is, establishing a statisitically reliable sample of the population to survey instead of surveying the entire population as is done each decade. The ACS data will be shared with local communities each year. It will start being shared with communities over 65,000 in population in August 2006. Communities over 20,000 will start getting the ACS data in 2008. All census tracts – the fundamental building block of the census – will get the data every year starting 2010.
Dr. Hudgins (that’s him to the left) was, in his own words, brought into the presentation to provide an alternative view of the census, in general, and of the ACS, in particular. His view is that the ACS is a unnecessary and a giant waste of taxpayer dollars. He believes the data is unreliable because respondants – like him – make up answers and lie on the survey. He also believes the data ages so quickly that it is generally not reliable enough to use as a basis for public policy decisions. He believes the decennial census should be used to apportion the country for political representation in the United States House of Representatives, and not much else.
That’s a highly condensed summary of the meeting. We also discussed the core issues that NLC would like us to work on this week. I’ll talk about those tomorrow.
