Detail of an interactive map from the New York Times, showing change of population between the 2000 and 2010 Census. According to the Census Bureau, a census tract including most of Saugerties (the darker brown area at center) lost 13.7 percent of its population in the last decade. Not really: It's the result of a ten-year-old error that the feds haven't fixed yet.
Relax, Saugerties: Despite some misleading data in the recent U.S. Census figures, people aren't actually fleeing the little town on the Hudson.
Adam Bosch of the Times Herald-Record has a juicy little item on the recent census: An error from 2000, in which inmates in two prisons in Wawarsing were mistakenly counted in Saugerties, is still distorting local census data. Though local officials caught the mistake years ago, he reports, the federal Census Bureau has yet to correct the error:
The result? The appearance of wild, incorrect swings in population for Saugerties and Wawarsing. In 2010, Saugerties showed a mass exodus when it actually grew modestly. And Wawarsing showed growth where it actually lost more than 700 people.
Whether prisoners -- most of whom hail from downstate -- ought to be counted in the districts they're incarcerated in is a whole other question.
Last year, state lawmakers passed a new piece of legislation, called the Census Adjustment Act, that means prisoners will now be counted at their former addresses, not where they are incarcerated. Since census figures are used to draw political districts -- and since prisoners don't vote -- the effect of counting prisoners where the prisons are located is to give voters in prison-heavy districts more political clout.
But Republicans in the state legislature, who vehemently opposed the bill, may be mounting legal challenges to it.
