Dear Members of the Union Township Planning Commission:

Union Township’s population is shrinking, as I pointed out in my previous article, “Paying People Not to Leave.” The township’s community and economic director, Rodney Nanney, acknowledged a decline when he spoke at the Aug. 19 Planning Commission meeting but tried to minimize its extent. The U.S. Census Bureau, he said, miscounted and misreported the 2020 census and subsequent estimates. But this false statement should not distract local officials from the township’s unfavorable situation.

Township officials should continue to ask themselves why people fail to vote for Union Township — including, apparently, Mr. Nanney, a point I will visit a bit later in this letter. Public evidence seems to indicate that he, too, chooses to live elsewhere.

Mr. Nanney’s presentation at the meeting included figures that show a declining population in the township. This data was in a report provided by the East Michigan Council of Governments. Nanney claimed, though, that the Census numbers used in the report were “significantly flawed.” This was, he argued, because they were taken at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore excluded a count of Central Michigan University students living in dormitories and presumably the surrounding area.

In his presentation Mr. Nanney said, in part:

We’ve had a number of cases where folks have cited this (population decline data) to say, “Hey look, we’re failing as a community, our population is down.” The 2020 census for our community was significantly flawed. If you remember the 2020 Census took place at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Central Michigan University was closed. The students had all been sent home just a few weeks before the Census count. Dorms were closed. Everybody was gone and then they took the count, and so we were severely undercounted from that population.

The student population is a significant part of our community. And so, I believe that this number is not accurate. That the 2020 number was not accurate at all and the problem is that the projections from there are based on that number.

On this point Mr. Nanney is simply wrong.

The Census Bureau counted students at their university address during the pandemic. That is clear from many online sources, including the Census Bureau itself. “Counting College Students,” a 2020 document from the bureau, says, “Even if you are away from your student housing due to your school being temporarily closed due to COVID-19, you will be counted at the student housing where you usually live.” The same source has a similar statement about private, off-campus housing. University students were counted where they lived, whether that was in Union Township or in the city of Mt. Pleasant.

Officials in the bureau’s Geography Division — specifically, the Customer Engagement Branch — confirmed to me that Central Michigan University’s dormitories were counted in the 2020 Census.

In addition, I called Central Michigan University about its dorm system. An administrator told me the university has no residence halls in Union Township. And the Census Bureau says it does not attribute population counts from incorporated cities such as Mt. Pleasant to townships. So even if the Census Bureau did not count the university’s dormitory population during the pandemic, it would be of no consequence to official Union Township population figures anyway.

Teasing out the many variables that drive population growth or decline in a given area is no easy task. Does it cost too much to live there? Does it cost too much to invest in a business and run it, or to raise a family in that location? Does the local government bear any responsibility for the cost of living and doing business? Local officials ought to ask themselves these questions.

Publicly available data indicates that your community and economic development director chooses not to live in Union Township. I emailed Mr. Nanney last week and asked him directly whether he lived there, but he did not respond.

He appears to be a resident of Midland instead. Two times during his presentation, he spoke of commuters who lived elsewhere and drove to Union Township for work. “It’s one of those ‘What can we do to attract those folks to live here as well as work here?’” situations, he said. He also briefly mentioned a few steps the township could do to “make some of these commuters into residents.”

It seems reasonable to ask, then, “If paid employee-experts won’t live there, why should others?” It is disconcerting that employees who help create or enforce Union Township policies and their consequences don’t want to live under those rules. It’s the rough equivalent of a restaurant’s top chef refusing to eat his own cooking.

Union Township’s population is shrinking, and that should worry township leaders. The population decline should be viewed as one canary in a coal mine and a reflection of the quality of life available in the township.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.