Phase 4 of the Redistricting Data Program Plan

The Census Bureau plans to continue the Redistricting Data Program (RDP) to collect the new congressional and state legislative district boundaries, or plans, from states under the generic clearance for the Geographic Partnership Programs (GPPs), OMB Control No. 0607-0795.

Once Congress is re-apportioned based on the 2010 Census population totals¹, the states begin the process of redistricting. During this process new boundaries are created for their congressional (CD) and state legislative districts (SLD). The Redistricting Data Office (RDO) will collect these newly redistricted plans during Phase 4 of the RDP. These will be the plans for the 113^th congressional and the 2012-2013 state legislative sessions. The U.S. Census Bureau will collect and process these plans during 2011 – 2012, and will continue to collect them, for states that conduct further redistricting, every two years thereafter. The Census Bureau retabulates the population of the new districts based on the 2010 Census and the states are provided with that new data. The CD and SLD boundaries collected during Phase 4 are also used for disseminating American Community Survey (ACS) data.

At the request of the RDO, state participants in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, will work with the Census Bureau to collect and process these plans. The state participants will collect these plans and provide them to the Census Bureau, along with additional information (population totals, legislation, etc.), as specified in the state participant instructions.

Phase 4 will have an annotation and a verification phase. During the annotation phase, the state participants use the 2010 Census data as provided to them by the RDO to create 2010 Census tabulation block equivalency files that will be used to update their CD and SLD boundaries. Once the states provide the block equivalency files, the Census Bureau will use those files to insert the new plans into various geographic databases. The Census Bureau will then provide verification block equivalency files and maps to the states. The states will review these materials and certify to the RDO that the boundaries are correct.

We estimate that this work will take each RDP state participant an average of 50 hours to complete (40 hours for the annotation phase and 10 hours for the verification phase). We estimate 52 states/state equivalents will participate, which totals 2,600 hours.

Please contact Colleen Joyce at 301-763-1099, or via e-mail at Colleen.D.Joyce@census.gov for additional information or clarifications.

1 The law requires that by April 1 of the year following the decennial census the Secretary of Commerce will furnish State officials or their designees with the new population totals.