The forecast, scored: the 2011 plan against the censuses that came

Town of Lakeville 2011 Comprehensive Plan (draft, 27 June 2011), read first-hand, against the banked decennial series

Lakeville has exactly one published forecast of itself, and it can now be scored: the town outgrew its planners — it reached their twenty-year figure's neighbourhood in ten years, and passed their 2020 projection before the ink of the next census was dry. The plan's method prints first, in its own words: official projections by the Indiana Business Research Center exist for counties, not for towns, so the plan projected Lakeville by linear regression at 25 per cent of the slope of Union Township's regression line — "the projection that will be used for Town planning purposes in this report." Its projected town series: 776 for 2010, 804 for 2015, 831 for 2020, and 870 at the end of the twenty-year planning period, 2027 — the plan adding that the 870 figure "obviously assumes some extensions of the corporate limits." The found censuses score it: the 2010 census, taken before the plan was adopted, counted 786 against the projection's 776 — a miss of ten, and a remarkable one, because the plan's own working estimate for 2009 had been 551 (NEW-F-2, printed here whole: the plan's estimate of 551 for 2009 and its ESRI table's town figures of 543 and 576 stand against the decennial counts of 567 in 2000 and 786 in 2010, unmerged — the plan's data chapter understated its town by roughly a third on the eve of the census that corrected it). The 2020 census counted 879 against the projection's 831: the town beat its twenty-year plan's 2020 figure by 48 people and reached the plan's 2027 figure of 870 nine years early — with, as the companion record shows, the one boundary extension the plan itself reported, the Morningside subdivision annexed on the town's northwest side at seventy home sites, doing part of the work the plan assigned to extensions. No earlier county-plan forecast for the town was reached. The forecast record therefore closes: one plan, one scored projection, beaten by the town it described.