Four years after the last census, almost a dozen small communities in the Midwest are going to be counted again in hopes of getting a new grocery store or more state funding to build roads, fire stations and parks. Eleven municipalities in Illinois and Iowa are the only cities in the U.S. so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau to recount their residents in 2024, the first year they can be conducted, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. With one exception, officials in these municipalities don’t think the original numbers were inaccurate. Their populations have grown so fast in three years that they are leaving state and federal funding on the table by not adding the extra growth to their population totals.
