Henrico’s Vithoulkas: Census population estimates are wrong

Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas pushed back strongly Friday on a U.S. Census Bureau population estimate published Thursday that projected the county had grown by only 207 residents in 2023.

The report, published annually by the Census Bureau, ranked Henrico’s estimated population growth as 81st among the 83 Virginia localities that it projected had experienced growth last year.

But the data was not close to accurate, said Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas.

“What we’ve estimated between 2022 and 2023 is [a population growth of] 5,168,” Vithoulkas told the Citizen.

That total, according to the Census estimates, would rank Henrico second in population growth in the state behind only Chesterfield County, which the Census Bureau estimated had grown by 5,586 residents. Henrico last year added more than 1,000 new residential units, Vithoulkas said, and has grown annually during the past decade or so at an average rate of about 1% annually (which amounts to roughly 3,000 to 5,000 new residents each year).

“It doesn’t surprise me that you get a result like this from a federal agency, because I mean in the past month, I can’t tell you how many complaints we’ve gotten in here about the Postal Service,” Vithoulkas said. “When I saw the [Citizen’s Thursday] story with the numbers that the Census put out, all I could think was ‘Here is USPS Part 2.’”

A number of Metro Richmond residents have complained about particularly slow, or non-existent, mail service in recent months, prompting the region’s Congressional delegation to write to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy seeking answers.

Henrico officials have been attempting to speak with someone at the Census Bureau “all day” Friday, Vithoulkas said.

“We will continue trying,” he said, “and when we do, we will have this data corrected.”

According to the Census Bureau, "the population estimates are used for federal funding allocations, as controls for major surveys including the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey (ACS), for community development, to aid business planning, and as denominators for statistical rates, among many other uses." The agency wrote that its estimates between 2010 were "very accurate" and had a mean absolute percent error (the average absolute difference between the final total resident population estimates and 2020 census counts) of only 2.9% across all U.S. counties.

In a 14-page document explaining the methodology that it employs for its annual United States Population Estimates, which approximate the population of every locality in the country from July 1 to July 1, the agency attributed its figures to a simple formula.

“Populations can change in three ways: people may be born (births), they may die (deaths), or they may move (domestic and international migration),” agency officials wrote. “The U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program measures this change and adds it to a base population to produce updated estimates every year.”

The Census Bureau’s data estimated that in 2023, Henrico added about 3,690 new residents through births and another 1,386 who arrived from other countries but concluded that it likely lost about 3,111 residents who died and another 1,760 who moved somewhere else in the United States. Accounting for partial numbers, the county’s estimated net gain amounted to just 207, according to the agency.

But, the agency wrote, the birth and death data that it receives from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Federal-State Cooperative for Population Estimates arrives on a two-year lag.

“For example, the most current full-detail birth and death data used [for the 2023 estimates] were from calendar year 2021,” officials wrote in their methodology explanation.

To estimate domestic migration, the agency uses Internal Revenue Service tax return data for people 0 to 64; Medicare enrollment data for those ages 65 and older; Social Security Administration Numerical Identification File data for people of all ages; and the change in the Group Quarters population (people who live in nursing homes, for example).

The agency has a more complex methodology for estimating international migration to and from individual localities, based upon various factors for different groups of residents.