2010 census count under way

MAT-SU — At a time when taxpayers are asking government to live within its means, they can help Uncle Sam by mailing their census forms back, said Mark Tanguay, director for the census operations for Alaska.

Operations for the 2010 U.S. census are under way. The census office has 900 agents traveling the state as part of the preliminary address canvassing campaign that happens before every census.

With hand-held GPS computers, agents physically locate every housing unit in the state, Tanguay said. They put in a brief description and take note of how many residences are in that building. They mark any new houses or changes to existing structures that may change the number of occupants, he said.

This continues until the middle of July when agents start canvassing group quarters like hospitals, prisons and dorms. All of this is in preparation for the actual census that begins March 2010.

Starting March 31, 2010, the Census Bureau mails forms to the addresses collected from the address canvassing. The form includes 10 questions asking for information including the names, number, race and ethnicity of the people who live at the address.

In 2000, the last census year, only 58 percent of Alaskans returned the mailer, Tanguay said. Because census agents are dispatched to the addresses that do not respond, the number of census employees in Alaska swells to as many as 4,000.

“When everybody is watching their tax dollars and federal spending,” said Tanguay, “they should send the forms back in so we don’t have to pay these people to collect the information.”

Tanguay said people often cite privacy as a reason for not sending the forms back. But he reminds them he is required by law to collect the information. If they don’t send the form in, someone will come knocking on their door, a much more intrusive act.

Privacy should not be a concern, he said, as no personal information is released for 72 years. Census Bureau employees are sworn to a lifetime oath of secrecy about the personal information they collect.

The information collected in the census is extremely important for a number of reasons, Tanguay said. It determines representation in state and federal government and the distribution of funds. For every person not counted, the state loses $3,000 in federal money, he said. If there were no follow-ups on the non-responses in the 2000 census, Alaska would have lost over $3 billion, he said.

Because the count is so important, Alaska takes special measures to serve the many communities without mail facilities. Through a program called Remote Alaska, census agents go to village communities to do the count manually. Agents knock or leave forms on doorsteps when a house does not have a mail box. There are even steps to count the urban homeless, Tanguay said.

In this year’s count, all responders will only answer the 10 questions on the census short form. In years past, 5 percent of the forms mailed out were the longer, survey-type questionnaires. These long forms generated the statistical information about households. This information is still being collected, but it is a separate process from the census. The census is purely a head count, which the statistical information can be applied to, Tanguay said.

“Our goal is to count everybody, count them once, and count them in the right place,” he said.

The numbers will be presented to President Obama on Dec. 31, 2010, and the statistical data will be released throughout 2011.

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.