CULLMAN — Cullman County grew in the past 10 years. Not everywhere; not at light speed, but it grew.

For five of the county’s smaller municipalities, there was no growth — at least not in terms of population. Ask the mayors at some of those towns, and you’ll be told that numbers aren’t everything. You might also be told that the 2010 Census underrepresented their towns’ population figures.

For other Cullman County towns and — by Alabama legislative standards, cities — there was an uptick in population. So, too, was there an increase in the number of people living in unincorporated Cullman County. As you can read elsewhere in today’s paper, the City of Cullman — the most populous of the county’s 11 incorporated cities and towns — saw modest growth.

And even though the county and its component parts did not undergo an overwhelming surge in the number of people living here, the relatively good news for growing cities and towns, as well as the county itself, is that more people — even a few more —means a little more money.

That’s sales tax money, yours and mine, 4 percent of which is collected uniformly and — with the exception of the City of Cullman — is distributed uniformly, with the money going nowhere else than to Cullman County and its municipal governments. An additional four percent is collected by the State of Alabama, and no town or government in Cullman County — or any other — has any control over how that money is distributed. The City of Cullman adds another half cent for education to its sales tax figure, making the total — 8.5 cents — the highest sales tax in the county, by half a cent.

Not everyone will be getting a greater share of those four pennies for every dollar; of that 4 percent. All of it will go to some governmental entity in Cullman County or other, but — with the exception of one percent for education, which is sacrosanct — the sales tax money will, for the next 10 years, be distributed to each municipal government at a rate different from that employed over the past decade.

A revision in sales tax apportionment is one of the tangible functions the decennial Census facilitates. There are others, such as reassessing — based on population — a city or town’s eligibility to receive grant money appropriated from federal budgets.

But local economic development officials have said none of the county’s population changes over these past ten years was significant enough to see any change in a municipality’s grant eligibility. Not even Good Hope, which for the first time became an Alabama “city,” as the legislature defines the term, will begin to qualify for more, or bigger, grants than it did before.

“It could make a difference in our grants, if the population figures were higher, but we’d have to reach the 100,000 mark as a county before it would make any difference,” said Cullman County Economic Development office manager Cherrie Haney. “That didn’t happen this time.”

“The Census numbers haven’t changed for 2010 to where it’s bumped up; to where we could get any different type of funding on anything we work on now,” added project coordinator Buchanan Jackson. “Even with what happened with Good Hope, not even they passed any grant eligibility thresholds that would change their status to put them over the top to qualify for additional grant allocations.”

So nothing will change anytime soon when it comes to the grant acquisition process. But on the sales tax side, the Census has an immediate effect.

Beginning this month, the Cullman County Sales Tax and Revenue Enforcement office will begin using the 2010 Census population figures to determine the portion of sales tax each municipality will receive. It affects a handful of towns positively; the rest — not so much.

Who lost people? Mostly the smallest of the towns, where even population losses in the mere dozens tends to skew percentages more dramatically than the towns’ day-to-day vitality might indicate.

* Read more in the Sunday, July 10, 2011, edition of The Cullman Times.