Census takers prepare to make tally of region's population

About two weeks ago, a team of 40 government employees visited hundreds of rural Southwest Virginia homes, to hand-deliver a 10-question form required for those residents to receive their fair share of nearly half a trillion federal dollars.

The U.S. Census Bureau followed those efforts this past week, as it mailed forms to nearly 12 million households across the country.

Emblazoned with the message “your response is required by law,” the forms – designed to provide a tally of every person living in the United States – should be arriving in mailboxes Monday.

“Our job is to count everyone predominantly at the place where they reside,” said Kate Martinson, director of the bureau’s Southwest Virginia office in Christiansburg., Va.

When those forms are returned, the numbers they contain will be used to set the number of seats that Virginia and Tennessee get in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the territory each one of those districts covers. The numbers also will be used to distribute the nearly $400 billion the U.S. government provides to states and communities each year. The distribution is based on population counts, so getting an accurate tally goes a long way toward determining how much money any community gets to build schools, hospitals and roads, to operate emergency services and to supply transportation services.

“It’s something that everybody can benefit from. It affects each and every person,” said Roger Kestner, director of the bureau’s Northeast Tennessee office in Johnson City, which supervises census takers in 12 Northeast Tennessee counties.

“The census is really coming out this year,” Kestner said. “It’s here and we need to participate.”

The count

Article I Section II of the U.S. Constitution requires that an enumeration, or count, of the country’s residents be done “within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of 10 years in such manner as they shall by law direct.”

So in August 1790, a year after Congress held its first session, the country’s first batch of census takers recorded a population of 3.9 million people, including about 700,000 slaves.

This year, in the nation’s 22nd census, demographers predict the country will record a population of almost 310 million.

“We’re counting the entire population of the United States,” Kestner said. That includes the homeless, prisoners, illegal immigrants, college students and people in the country on resident visas, he said.

The Census Bureau actually started its counting efforts for this enumeration more than a year ago, when on March 25, 2009, it sent 140,000 people into communities across the country to verify the 145 million addresses in its database. The goal was to ensure the bureau wasn’t missing a single place where a person might be living.

The address verification continued earlier this month as 40 census takers hand-delivered forms to all of Lee County, Va., parts of Grayson and Giles counties, and the areas surrounding Damascus, Glade Spring and Chilhowie in Washington County.

“Those areas did not have the 9-1-1 [street] addresses,” during the last census, Martinson said. “They had a rural route address with box numbers.”

Because the bureau couldn’t be certain whether those rural routes had changed over the past 10 years, she said, it sent employees to hand-deliver forms to the homes in those areas. The census workers also recorded any address changes.

“The hope is that we will have a correct address for everyone in the United States at the end of the census,” Martinson said.

People who receive a hand-delivered form, through what the bureau calls the update-leave operation, will still be required to mail them back to the bureau’s main office, she said.

The next wave of census takers, who should hit the streets at the end of March, will be responsible for visiting what the bureau calls group quarters: homeless shelters, nursing homes, college dorms or any situation where unrelated people live at the same address. This part of the operation could pose an interesting twist for the region’s college towns, because for the first time: “All college students are being counted where they are on April 1,” Martinson said.

Usually, they’re still living on campus at that time.

College students who lived in off-campus housing or commute to school are always counted in the communities they reside, Martinson said. But in previous counts, students who lived in the dorms were listed at their parent’s homes, because those parents supported the students and paid their tuition.

As a result, the communities of Emory and Meadowview, which in 2000 had a combined population of 2,266, might gain an extra 600 to 700 residents in the current census. That’s how many students are currently living in Emory & Henry College’s dorms, college spokesman Dirk Moore said.

To make the counting operation possible, Kestner and Martinson plan to hire a combined 2,200 people who will work in the 20-county area served by their offices. People interested in working for the Census Bureau as it conducts the count should call the bureau’s toll free employment hot line at (866) 861-2010.

“This is an excellent opportunity for people looking for a part-time job,” Martinson said, adding that she and Kestner have plenty of space on their teams available for would-be census takers.

The forms

The Census Bureau has one goal for the first few phases of this year’s operation: Ensure that every person in the United States gets a form. Every decade that the U.S. Census Bureau, or its predecessor the U.S. Census Board, has conducted a count of the population, it has tweaked the information it seeks.

The original 1790 census form asked recipients to tally the number of free white men under 16, free white men over 16, free white women, free men of other races and slaves that lived in their households at any given time.

This year’s form contains a menu of 12 categories people can use to describe their race or ethnic heritage: white, black, American Indian or Alaska native, Asian-Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, other Asian, and other Pacific Islander.

The form also allows residents to indicate whether they are of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish decent, and to provide the name of any other group they identify with.

“If a person wants to say they are blue and Martian then that’s fine,” Martinson said, adding that any ethnic group will be counted as part of this year’s census, no matter how uncommon it might be.

Information about a person’s race or ethnic group goes a long way toward ensuring that next year’s redistricting process – when state legislatures redraw the lines for their congressional districts – meets the guidelines set forth in the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

The information about a person’s race and heritage also is used to help state and local governments determine whether they should use bi-lingual road signs on highways or public facilities.

This year’s form also asks recipients to provide their ages, which the U.S. government uses to plan and operate programs specifically designed to help children, childbearing women, working age people and the elderly. The result of the final question, which asks whether a person owns or rents their home, is used to monitor the general state of the economy and administer housing programs that could influence homeownership rates.

But this year’s 10-question form does not include questions about income, employment or education. For the past two censuses, 1990 and 2000, those queries were included in a long-form questionnaire sent to a randomly selected group of households. But not this year.

“There is only one form this year and it is 10 questions long,” Martinson said, adding that the form is perhaps the shortest census the bureau has mailed out in recent history.

The bureau’s American Community Survey division is taking over the long-form questions, Martinson said. That frees up normal census workers to focus on this year’s count, she said.

The staff

Any census taker who stops by a person’s door to gather information must first undergo a federal background check and swear an oath to keep whatever information they gather strictly confidential. Local office directors, including Kestner and Martinson, take this oath seriously.

“We can’t let anybody come to the office to take photos or anything like that,” Kestner said, repeating a confidentiality policy that bars the media from walking around with census takers or stopping by the office to talk to them in person.

The reason for this policy, Kestner said, is a fear that someone might actually see the information contained on a person’s form. Violating that oath is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and five years in prison. The federal statue that makes it illegal for census takers to violate their oath also mandates that everyone participates.

Failure to fill out a census form is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, said Tammie McGee, spokeswoman for the bureau’s Charlotte regional office, which supervises census takers in Tennessee, Virginia and four other states.

But, McGee said, the bureau hardly prosecutes people for not filling out the forms. Instead, it uses an aggressive marketing and public relations campaign to let people know why the census is important and why they should participate.

This year’s campaign has involved television commercials during the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and other national sporting events. It also involves a travelling road show that will be stopping by the Bristol Motor Speedway next weekend in time for the Scott’s 300 and Food City 500 races.

The Census Bureau also relies on persistence: Between May 1 and July 10, the bureau will send at least one employee to every household in America that hasn’t by that time submitted a form. The census workers will encourage the residents living there fill the form out on the spot.

That last part of the count is expected to keep Southwest Virginia’s crop of census takers especially busy. During the 2000 Census, eight counties – Buchanan, Dickenson, Wise, Lee, Scott, Russell, Tazewell and Grayson – had participation rates of 64 percent to 68 percent. The national average for participation, measuring the number of people who mail their forms back on time, was 72 percent.

Virginia’s overall participation rate was 73 percent. Tennessee’s was 69 percent.

William Hatcher, a regional director for the U.S. Census Bureau, said in a written statement that the bureau is encouraging higher participation rates.

“If the people of Virginia complete the census form and return it quickly,” he said, “then we won’t have to go out, knock on doors, and collect the information.”

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518