The U.S. Census Bureau has rejected Haines’ appeal of the agency’s 2020 count, which showed the Southeast Alaska community’s population dropping by 17%, or 428 residents.
“I’m deeply disappointed. I really thought that our response was compelling,” said Borough Clerk Alekka Fullerton, who worked on the appeal. “I was mad. It’s a big deal to our community.”
Multiple federal funding programs are based on the census count.
The Census Bureau counted 2,080 residents in Haines in 2020, down from 2,508 in 2010. The borough appealed that number in June.
The federal bureau also reported a drop in population in Wrangell from 2010 to 2020 — an 11% decrease, going from 2,369 to 2,127 residents. Wrangell did not appeal the census count.
Though the Census Bureau acknowledged it had found some errors in its Haines work, “the corrections did not change the counts for your total housing and population, so there is no change to your official 2020 Census counts,” Deborah M. Stempowski, an associate director for the Census count, wrote to the Haines mayor.
Fullerton said the borough still didn’t believe it had lost nearly 20% of its residents since the 2010 census. She said the challenge took hours of painstaking work reviewing housing units.
“We were very convinced our position was compelling,” Fullerton reported to the borough assembly for its Feb. 13 meeting.
She said the community doesn’t feel like it has lost a fifth of its population. “If we had lost 500 people from town, why would we have a housing crisis?” she said. “We would feel it and there’d be a lot of empty houses.”
The state of Alaska does its own annual population estimate that shows Haines has remained relatively stable over the past few years. The state’s July 2023 estimate put the community’s population at 2,530, which is 450 residents more than the Census Bureau counted.
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