Los Angeles City Hall’s latest effort to update the Hollywood Community Plan, released in mid-June, badly misses the mark by using outdated data that ignores the slowing growth rate for L.A. unveiled by the U.S. Census in May.

The controversial Hollywood Community Plan, which city leaders have tried to use as a political lever to bring in skyscrapers — while wiping out historic neighborhoods that stand in the way — has been mired in legal troubles for years, and was rejected by the courts.

Now, the city has released another plan for massive growth and destruction of cherished historic neighborhoods that relies, again, on overblown old population data from the Southern California Association of Governments — while ignoring the reality from the U.S. Census.

The Hollywood Community Plan “Draft Environmental Impact Report” released today shows Hollywood with an exaggerated 2016 population of 206,000, produced before the Census recently corrected the numbers for L.A.’s true population.

The Census data shows that Los Angeles did not pass 4 million people in April of 2016, and has only this year reached 3.97 million. The state, city and media all erroneously reported last year that Los Angeles zipped past the 4 million mark in April of 2016. That was wrong, according to the U.S. Census.

And while city politicians were insisting L.A. grew by 50,000 people in the most recent year, the Census found it was in fact 27,000 people.

Numbers matter. The Southern California Association of Government’s (SCAG) often-inflated figures are used by cities in which undue land-developer influence has more sway with elected leaders than that of the residents.

That is certainly the case in Los Angeles.

In service to developers who shower them with campaign contributions, L.A. city officials are clinging to bad data that pre-dates the U.S. Census May 2017 downward revision of L.A.’s slowing growth rate.