Warrenville, Pingree Grove among Midwestern towns that will be counted again like it’s 2020

Four years after the last census, almost a dozen small communities in the Midwest — including Warrenville and Pingree Grove — are going to be counted again in hopes of more state funding to build roads, fire stations and parks.

The suburbs are among eleven small towns in Illinois and Iowa that are the only municipalities so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau for a second count of their residents in 2024 and 2025, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. The first year in which the special censuses can be conducted is 2024.

With one exception, city officials don't think the numbers from the original count were inaccurate. It's just that their populations have grown so fast in three years that officials believe they are leaving state funding for roads and other items on the table by not adding the extra growth to their population totals.

“We’ve been the fastest-growing city in Illinois since 2010,” Pingree Grove Village President Amber Kubiak said.

Several residential developments have been built in Pingree Grove since 2000, including a Carillon at Cambridge Lakes senior-adult community, Parkside and Cambridge Lakes North. Kubiak expects the special census will show another 2,000 to 3,000 people moved to town since the 2020 census.

The village will pay an estimated $373,333 for the census. But it will recoup that by receiving an additional $1 million or so in population-based revenue from the state over the next several years, she said.

Pingree Grove doubled from more than 4,500 residents in 2010 to more than 10,300 residents in 2020. “We have affordable housing in a really great atmosphere,” Kubiak said. “It’s a beautiful place to live.”

Officials in Warrenville, a suburb with more than 13,500 residents in 2020, believe they can get an extra $1.2 million annually in federal and state funding, based on the calculation that they have added almost 1,000 new residents.

The city “did very conservative estimating,” Warrenville Mayor David Brummel said.

“We realized that there was an opportunity to capture some additional revenue that would not be available to us until the next census was taken,” Brummel said.

Officials estimate the city has gained 986 residents since the 2020 census, mostly from the Everton, Lexington Trace, Arden, Westlyn and Riverview West developments. The city will pay $427,424 for a special census to get an updated population count.

“We made an investment with a certain return,” the mayor said. “... It seemed like a missed opportunity if we didn't do it.”

The special census process is expected to begin at the end of April. Residents will get a link from the city to complete a survey. Field workers will go door-to-door in June and July to get responses from residents who did not fill out the census online, according to a timeline from the city.

Unlike the 2020 census, the second counts won’t be used for redrawing political districts or determining how many congressional seats each state gets. Instead, they will be used to determine how much the communities will get in state funding that often is calculated by population size. Communities losing population in the past three years have nothing to worry about — their declining numbers won’t catch up with them until after the 2030 census.

Local, state and tribal governments across the U.S. have until May 2027 to ask for a special census from the Census Bureau. While the tab for the 2020 head count was picked up by the federal government, the local municipalities have to foot the bill for their special censuses. The cost ranges from just over $370,000 to almost $500,000.

Some communities have already forged ahead with their own do-it-yourself recounts. Others have challenged their numbers with the Census Bureau and gotten small wins.

The cities in Iowa paying for a Census Bureau-run second count — Altoona, Bondurant, Grimes, Johnston, Norwalk, Pleasant Hill and Waukee — are fast-growing suburbs of Des Moines. The reason special censuses are so popular in Iowa is because the state uses the once-a-decade head count as the official population when it comes to funding based on population size, said Gary Krob, coordinator for the State Data Center at the State Library of Iowa.

– Daily Herald staff writers Susan Sarkauskas and Katlyn Smith contributed to this report