In the lead-up to the April 2020 Census, McHenry County is hosting a series of public meetings designed to educate citizens and ensure that the county’s population is accurately counted.
The Ad Hoc McHenry County Complete Count Committee is co-chaired by Michael Vijuk, a McHenry County board member for District 1, and Brian Sager, the Mayor of Woodstock.
The other seventeen members include representatives from the other five county board districts as well as organizations such as an Episcopal and a Catholic church, the Huntley Park District, the McHenry Public Library District, and the McHenry County Workforce Network.
The Committee’s first public rally was on September 25 at the County Administration Building in Woodstock.
Around four dozen people attended the meeting, including representatives from the League of Women Voters and the United Way charitable organization. State Senator Craig Wilcox was also in attendance. “We had a cross-section of [attendees], from libraries to townships, from fire departments to…public health,” Vijuk said.
An accurate Census count is crucial to Sager and Vijuk, and they stressed the importance of reaching out to commonly underreported groups. People might be “afraid of information getting out to the general public, for whatever reason they may have,” Vijuk said.
Other reasons for people not answering the Census, he said, include not having the time to, or not understanding the importance of answering it.
Various ethnic, age-related and geographic groups are frequently miscounted during the decennial Census. Vijuk reported children under the age of four as one notable example.
The Census can be answered in a variety of manners throughout April 2020. Phone calls, mailings, in-person and online reports are the county’s preferred options, with online responses being the most common.
If a resident does not report their household’s population in one of these ways, Census collectors will go their homes to get an accurate count.
“For McHenry County, the participation rate dropped two percent from the 2000 Census to the 2010 Census,” Alicia Schueller, assistant to the county administrator, said in an email.
As such, she added, the Committee will continue to inform the public about the economic and political importance of an accurate count. They plan to host a meeting each month until the Census occurs, except for the month of December.
According to Sager, the July 2018 estimate for McHenry County’s population was 308,570, and a more accurate count should be available after the Census.
“The methodology in 2020…is updated and changed, based upon tech, from the approach taken in 2010,” he said.
Sager said $675 billion in federal funding is allocated to counties nationwide, based largely on their populations as reported by the Census. The funds are used for a diverse array of services including education, water distribution, economic and housing development, and fire and police departments.
The Census will also determine school district boundaries as well as those for national and state congressional districts.
Huntley, as well as Sun City itself, is split between McHenry County to the north and Kane County to the south, with the east-west portion of Kreutzer Road serving as the dividing line. The McHenry County portion of Sun City belongs to Census tract 8715, while the larger Kane County section is in the smaller tract 8507.02.
Both tracts had Census return rates of more than 90 percent, whereas McHenry County as a whole had the majority of tracts report between 80 and 90 percent.
“We need everyone to participate and be counted,” Vijuk said. “There are three things…I think all people should do: one is to vote, one is to serve on a jury, and the third is participate in the Census.”
Or, as Sager put it: “this is not a count for today. This is a count for the future.”
