Secretary Galvin, NCSL warn Massachusetts to start census outreach now amid undercount risks

Boston — State and national lawmakers and experts told the Massachusetts Senate that efforts to secure a complete 2030 census count should begin now, warning that declining municipal record quality, shifting housing patterns and heightened immigrant anxiety could depress self‑response.

William F. Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth, told the committee Massachusetts must bolster municipal records, conduct proactive outreach and provide technical grants to municipalities and community groups to avoid an undercount that would reduce federal funding and political representation.

"We need to make sure these local records are kept better," Secretary Galvin said. He cited retirements of local clerks, problems with postal delivery and changes in housing use — for example, industrial buildings converted to housing — as immediate concerns for the state’s address and resident lists.

Representatives from the National Conference of State Legislatures urged the legislature to consider optional programs including Complete Count Committees and targeted grants. Wendy Underhill, director of elections and redistricting at NCSL, said complete count committees can increase self‑response and said 47 states established such committees for 2020; Massachusetts created a committee for the last cycle and allocated funds to community grants.

Helen Brewer, a senior policy specialist at NCSL, told the panel federal formulas for programs such as Medicaid and transportation channel large sums — GW’s Institute of Public Policy estimates roughly $1 trillion per year nationally is allocated based on census statistics — and gave an example that Massachusetts received about $22.8 billion in fiscal 2016 from programs that use census-based allocation.

Galvin described steps taken after 2020, including the use of municipal records and university housing data to document student populations when on-campus closures complicated counting efforts. He said those local records were crucial in 2020: "We were able to construct an alternative body of data that we were able to offer the Census Bureau as proof that these people were here," he said.

Galvin told the committee he has proposed an additional $500,000 in the House budget for grants and technical assistance to municipalities; the House included that sum but the Senate budget did not. Galvin said the funding would be used for time‑sensitive tasks such as mailings and local outreach and for helping municipalities prepare LUCA submissions in 2027.

Panelists emphasized specific near‑term steps for the state: verify whether the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office will continue to act as the consolidated BAS filer for localities, help convene municipal complete‑count efforts, provide targeted grants and maintain ongoing contact with Census Bureau liaisons. NCSL staff offered state resources and a timeline for state activity and said they will publish materials and success stories from LUCA work in other places.

The witnesses also cautioned that policy and legal questions will be litigated and that the bureau’s privacy measures (differential privacy, the disclosure‑avoidance system used in the prior decade) create tradeoffs between confidentiality and precision. NCSL urged coordination with the Census Bureau and early planning to reduce the risk of a repeat of challenges seen in 2020.