NEW BERN, N.C. — New Bern won a challenge against the U.S. Census Bureau, city officials said Thursday.
The city challenged population estimates that the federal agency releases annually, saying they did not accurately reflect the municipality's population.
The census originally showed slowing growth trends for the city in 2021 and 2023 and a negative population estimate for 2022.
Mayor Jeffrey Odham said city officials were concerned that the numbers didn't account for residents who were not living in the area because their homes still were being repaired after Hurricane Florence, which struck in 2019 and caused widespread flooding along the coast. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, census data was not collected in person, possibly affecting the count, he said.
City officials spent nine months preparing a challenge, including researching new housing that had been built in that period, to the Census Bureau's numbers.
The bureau acknowledged errors in its building data, Odham said.
The city says its new population estimates are:
- 31,786 (268 over the census estimate) in 2021
- 32,508 (992 over the census estimate) in 2022
- 33,758 (1,532 over the census estimate) in 2023
Low census numbers can affect a city’s ability to get federal funding.
