Chattanoogans are about to be counted and Census Bureau officials said Sunday they want to make sure they don't miss anyone.
Every household should receive the official census questionnaire in the mail this week -- some as soon as today. To encourage everyone to fill out the 10-question survey, the Census 2010 Road Show rolled into church Sunday to preach the value of completing the census form.
"It takes only about 10 minutes to fill out, and the results are very important in the distribution of more than $400 billion a year in federal funds as well as how congressional and legislative districts are shaped," said Ron Brown, a regional coordinator for the U.S. Census Bureau's Partnership and Data Services.
Census workers handed out free water bottles and T-shirts following the Sunday morning service at the New Covenant Fellowship Church in Brainerd and urged church parishioners to familiarize themselves with the census questions in advance of the forms arriving in the mail.
The church's pastor, Dr. Bernie Miller, is chairman of the U.S. Census Bureau's African American Advisory Committee and wants to make sure that everyone is counted in the decennial census this year.
"The African-American community is very wary of anybody with a badge and a clipboard and some may be afraid that the information that they give may somehow be used against them," he said. "But we have been assured that the Patriot Act or any other law will not or cannot ever trump confidentiality."
This year's census is one of the shortest ever since the bureau gathers more extensive data from household sampling each year as part of its American Community Surveys. In the 2000 census, Mr. Brown said 67 percent of all U.S. households filled and mailed back the census questionnaire. The other one third of households were contacted by census takers going door to door.
Karen Stanley, the local census office manager to the six-county area in Southeast Tennessee, said up to 1,500 temporary workers will work on the 2010 census in the Chattanooga area. She hopes census enumerators will contact every household that doesn't respond to this week's mailed survey by July.
What's next?* The 10-question census survey will arrive in the mail today through Wednesday.* Census workers will begin counting homeless and nursing home residents in late March.* April 1 is the official census day, the reference date for all census data.* May-July -- Census takers go door to door to households that did not respond to the mailed census form.Questionnaire for 2010 Community Survey
Mayor Ron Littlefield, who brags that Chattanooga is the state's fastest growing major city after convincing the Census Bureau to revise its population estimates for the city upward three years ago, said it is critical for everyone to be counted.
"What we've been traveling on lately are estimates," he said. "It's very important that the actual count reflects what we believe is happening in this community or we'll have to go back through that long process again of appealing the count."
The last census in 2000 counted 281,421,906 people living in the United States, including 155,554 in Chattanooga. The Census Bureau estimates there are more than 308 million Americans today, including more than 170,000 in Chattanooga. But the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 2) calls for an exact count every 10 years.