Census 2010: Massive Count Years In The Making, Officials Say
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U.S. Census officials are urging city residents who have not completed the forms to get them back by week's end, stressing that the results are in everyone's best interest. NY1's Shazia Khan filed the following report.Years before the U.S. Census and its census takers rolled into town, city officials were busy working with federal enumerators to make sure New York would get a fair count.
"Unless you are on the Census Bureau's address list, you don't exist, you don't get a questionnaire, your address is not registered, and people don't realize that in order to be counted you need to have an address," said Joe Salvo of the New York City Department of Planning.
Salvo says he and and his colleagues have been working overtime to add addresses to the census rolls.
"The 300,000 people that get added as a result of the 127,000 units that we contributed, it's like adding a city the size of Pittsburgh to New York and $900 million in a budget, the size of New York City's budget is very, very important," Salvo said.
At a time when municipal budgets are being stretched to the limit, authorities believe it's more important than ever to fill out the brief questionnaire. But failing that, census takers will take to the city streets, going door to door, doing their best to come up with as accurate a count as possible.
"If you don't send in your form that means somebody has to go into your house which is much more expensive and less accurate," said Angelo Falcon of the National Institute for Latino Policy. "It turns out when people fill out the forms, the information they send is much more accurate than the information people get when they have to visit your house."
"A lot of federal and state aid is given on a per capita basis so the more people you have, the better you do with aid distribution. "I have read that each person is worth about $2,000 as allocations of all grant monies from higher levels of government so that gives incentive to find every last person even if it costs $100 to do it, you're going to get more than that," said CUNY Center for Urban Research Director John Mollenkopf.
For more information on the 2010 U.S. Census, visit http://2010.census.gov/2010census/.