If you haven’t already received one, you’ll soon get a rather nondescript official envelope in the mail.
Don’t toss it in the trash.
It’s the 2010 census form, and it’s not only your civic duty to return it, it’s in your financial best interest.
The form, one of the shortest and simplest versions in recent memory, asks very basic questions – name, age, ethnicity – and will take only a few minutes to fill out.
That small chore, however, has huge consequences. The once-a-decade population count will determine how nearly $450 billion a year in federal assistance – nearly $1,500 a person, according to a new Brookings Institution study – will be divvied up for everything from school lunches and health care for the poor to road construction.
In 2000, only 55 percent of Sacramento households mailed back their forms, far less than the 70 percent return rate statewide. That means more than 13,000 Sacramentans went uncounted, a gap that cost local governments and school districts millions in lost federal funds over the decade.
This time, in the middle of a deep economic downturn, Sacramento has to do better.
Sacramento County is one of 13 “hard-to-count” counties getting special attention from the California Complete Count committee created by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The list, which also includes Fresno and San Joaquin counties, includes those that had the largest undercounts in 2000 and that have large numbers of people most at risk of being missed: the poor and non-English speakers.
While California’s return rate was slightly higher than the national average in 2000, an estimated 523,000 Californians were missed, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said in a study to Congress.
That cost the state more than $15 billion over the decade, money that would have come in handy during this budget crisis.
If you don’t send in the form, a census taker will most likely be knocking on your door early next month. It would be much easier on everyone – and cheaper for taxpayers – if you just mail it in.