Metro

Deep-‘seated’ trouble

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WASHINGTON — The big loser in the 2010 Census is New York state, which will lose two seats in the House of Representatives to faster-growing Southern and Western states where residents are being lured by lower taxes and warmer weather.

Only Ohio lost as many representatives — a perilous loss of political clout and federal aid as the muscle in Congress shifts dramatically from mostly Democratic northern states to Republican bastions like Texas, which will pick up four congressional seats.

Mayor Bloomberg called the national Census data, released yesterday by the Commerce Department, “a good wake-up call perhaps to our state government” that he believes Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo will understand.

“Unless we make this an attractive state to do business in and to live in, people are going to continue to move out. We have to reverse that trend,” Bloomberg said.

“In New York City our population is at a record high, people are moving in, but we’re part of New York state as well and if the state Legislature were, for example, to raise taxes, people can’t leave the country but they sure can leave the state,” he said.

New York state’s population of 19.4 million inched up 2.1 percent compared with the national growth rate of 9.7 percent, according to the Census.

The Census results will have a national impact in 2012 — from President Obama’s re-election bid to a Democratic effort to retake the majority in the House. Obama in 2008 lost five of the eight states that are gaining seats, and he won in eight of the 10 that are losing seats.

The new Census data begins a long and contentious redistricting process as state legislators divvy up the spoils, usually through a strictly partisan process, to create new congressional districts to reflect population changes.

Albany insiders predict that the politically divided state Legislature is all but certain to ax one upstate Republican and either an upstate or suburban Democrat — reflecting the legislative balance of power now that the GOP has retaken the state Senate and Democrats retain control of the Assembly.

“At least an 18-month drama is going to unfold,” said Rep. Peter King (R-LI), who has witnessed redistricting battles before. “It gets tense.”

Additional reporting by Fredric U. Dicker and Sally Goldenberg