“The Census is about data, money and power,” Donahue Institute manager tells Senate committee
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, SEPT. 22, 2025…..The first formal step in the 2030 Census process is expected to kick off in Massachusetts December, as cities and towns, the Secretary of State’s office and researchers prepare for the high stakes, once-in-a-decade count.
“The Census is about data, money and power,” Susan Strate, senior program manager for the UMass Donahue Institute’s Population Estimates Program, told the Senate Census Committee on Monday. Census-related hearings are being held now to help raise awareness and help municipalities begin to understand what they need to move forward, according to Committee Chair Sen. William Brownsberger.
“We use Census data all the time for public health, for municipal planning, state planning, transportation planning, and all sorts of public concerns,” Strate said. “The decennial count, or the count that we get once every 10 years, sets the base for the estimates, the forecasts and the American Community Survey for the 10 years that follow. You really only get one chance to set the base, it’s once every 10 years.”
Census counts are the underpinning of federal funding formulas, as well as the apportionment of Congressional seats among the states. Massachusetts lost a seat as a result of the 2010 Census. In the 2020 Census, the state was counted at more than seven million people, making it the fastest-growing state in the Northeast and marking the fastest growth seen in Massachusetts since the 1960s, according to Strate.
The office of Secretary of State William Galvin, who serves as the state’s Census liaison, expects the “first formal step” of the next Census, the Block Boundary Suggestion Project, to begin in December 2025 and end around May 2026.
“Although the Census itself is five years away, the work more or less never stops, and indeed is now picking up as we head to the final five years,” said John Rosenberry, legislative director in the Secretary of State’s office.
“The Block Boundary Suggestion Project is an opportunity for every city or town to review their block boundaries. These are the smallest foundational geographic shapes within a city or town that are used as the building blocks for census tracts, for political subdivisions, and on districts and congressional districts, etc. They all start at the block boundary suggestion phase,” Rosenberry said.
“It is the once-in-a-decade opportunity for those cities and towns to provide updates, add new roads, account for new developments,” Rosenberry added. In the 2020 cycle, the secretary’s office estimates that over 75% of municipalities responded during the project with some amendments or corrections over the prior cycle.
The office works with the Donahue Institute throughout the Census process, and is starting to work on Census outreach across the state. Rosenberry said the secretary’s outreach at the county level will likely focus on where growth has been slowing or population has been lost in recent Census data, like in Berkshire County.
Beginning in 2027, tribal, state and local governments will also be able to partake in the Local Update to Census Addresses (LUCA) program, which gives them the chance to review the Census Bureau’s list of residential addresses. If a housing unit is not included in the Census Bureau’s Master Address File, it won’t receive an invitation to the 2030 Census, Strate said. The highest-ranking member of local government can appoint a LUCA liaison, she added, pinpointing an individual or team who will then lead that review.
“The Census Bureau is increasing their reliance on technology and third party data, and they’re decreasing their efforts on the ground, or what we would call field canvassing,” Strate said. “So if there’s some local knowledge to be shared that is not going to be picked up through some of these other methods, we want to make sure that those addresses get in.”
Putting together a comprehensive list of addresses could be challenging, according to Strate, who “under-the-roof” housing developments like conversions and in-law apartments, as well as newly-legal accessory dwelling units, can be difficult for technology to pick up but would likely be detected through canvassing.
Ensuring there’s local input on canvassing methods will be necessary to avoid undercounts, according to Groton Town Clerk Grace Bannasch, who worked in Shutesbury last Census. Some communities in 2020, especially those in Western Massachusetts without internet access, were targeted for online canvassing, Bannasch said, leading to what she believes was an undercount in certain, more rural places.
“So obviously, you were going to get an undercount. A specific example would be New Salem, which was primarily targeted for online response. Most people in New Salem at the time did not have internet access at home. So that was never going to work out,” Bannasch said.
“There [has been] a lot of turnover in these municipal offices over the last few years. So we’re coming into 2030, there’s a lack of experience on the ground, there are a lot of vacancies in these offices,” Bannasch added. “So it’s going to be more important than ever to be proactive in terms of training and reaching out, especially to the municipalities, because in so many cases, no one is going to be in those offices who’s ever gone through this process before.”
Along with a lack of institutional knowledge of the process, some towns without comprehensive address databases, like Groton, will need more hands-on help and tools from the state to make sure address data can be exchanged and compiled across different local-level departments.
Brownsberger told the News Service after the hearing that “I think what we did pick up here is, sort of a range of levels of readiness for this — a range of the extent to which there are formalized procedures for defining addresses in communities, and a range in the extent to which communities have a central database in hand that they will be able to use when they’re called upon to validate census data.”
The Boston Democrat said he’s hoping to hold a second hearing within the next month, “maybe as soon as [in] a week or two” to hear from representatives from the Census Bureau and talk more about address gathering. Another issue on his mind in the coming months is outreach strategies to make the general public aware and receptive to Census questions.
“That’s an especially complicated question this year with all the enforcement that’s been directed at immigrants,” Brownsberger said, adding that the Census counts all “persons,” regardless of their legal status. “We need to make sure we’re reaching the immigrant communities to make a complete count in those communities. And one of the dynamics there will be whether we have questions about citizenship.”
July 2024 Census population estimates suggested the U.S. population saw an almost 1% year-over-year increase, the highest margin of growth in decades. It was driven by net international migration, according to the Census Bureau. In August, President Donald Trump said that he instructed his administration to work on a new, mid-decade Census that would exclude people living in the U.S. without legal status. According to Associated Press reporting, experts suggest conducting a mid-decade Census would be difficult to accomplish.
Asked if there’s heightened importance in the 2030 Census, considering the existing fiscal strains between Massachusetts and the federal government and Trump’s Census rhetoric, Brownsberger suggested there is.
“Yeah, in the sense that there may be a little turbulence federally, and so we need to be rock solid here, so that we can deal with it. I think you heard in the testimony today, that there’s so much that has to happen in the run up to the Census. The notion of, ‘Hey, let’s do a Census now and see what it says’ — it doesn’t work that way,” Brownsberger said. “There’s a lot of preparation to get the Census done, to get it done right, and so there will be a Census in 2030 and we want to be as ready as we can.”
