[Charter-Com] population data found!

[Tony Becker]

All:

I was able to find population data broken down by voting district.  The data was obtained from the Census Bureau's "American FactFinder" web site.  The resulting PDF report was several megabytes in size, so I uploaded it to the web site rather than send it as an attachment.

The URL for the FactFinder site:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/AdvGeoSearchByListServlet?_lang=en&_command=getPlacenames

The URL for the report:

http://jeffcocharter.org/doc/population.pdf


Data is also available by census tract (roughly corresponding to municipalities and townships), block groups (roughly corresponding to wards), and blocks (not the same as city blocks; corresponding to a group of about 50-100 homes.)  But to the extent that we can create reasonable districts using the already-existing voting districts, there's no need to use such low-level data.

What I did to generate the report: Select "Census 2000" for the year/program, as this is the most recent data for which more detailed data is available.  Search for data at the "Voting District/Remainder" level.  It will then ask you to select a state and county.  At this point, it will present a list of all the voting districts defined in the county.  I printed out a sheet for each district and combined them into a single document.

Note that these are the voting districts as they were defined in 2000, NOT as they were redefined afterward and obviously NOT accounting for changes in population since then.  Nevertheless, I feel that basing county council districts on the most recently available population data from the U.S. Census is a fairer way to allocate districts than by using the registered voter list.  Voter registration numbers fluctuate fairly rapidly.


Best,
Tony