About half of local households returned their census forms by
the recommended April 1 deadline, on par with the state
average.
About half of local households returned their census forms by the recommended April 1 deadline, on par with the state average.
As of late last week, half of Gilroy residents had mailed in the forms that count the United States population every 10 years. People who don’t return their forms will be visited by census workers who will take the count in person.
In Salinas, 44 percent of residents returned their forms. In Morgan Hill, 53 percent returned their forms, putting them above the state average, which was 48 percent as of March 30.
In both Hollister and San Juan Bautista, 49 percent of respondents had mailed in their forms.
The Census Bureau spends $57 to send a worker to a household, but only 42 cents if the household returns its form by mail. Every percentage point increase in the national return rate saves the government $85 million. In the previous census in 2000, approximately 72 percent of households returned their forms without follow-up visits.
More than half of the nation’s households had returned their forms as of Tuesday, according to the Census Bureau, which had mailed or hand-delivered approximately 134 million questionnaires. Central and upper Midwestern states had the highest return rates, while Southern states had the lowest.
“We’re off to a great start, but we still have a ways to go before getting a complete count of the nation,” Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said in a press release. “If everyone in the nation took the 10 minutes needed to fill out and mail back their 2010 census form, we could cut the cost of conducting the census by $1.5 billion.”
Groves said parts of Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana lag behind the rest of the country in census participation. The participation rate in Miami, for example, was 38 percent as of Tuesday.
“There’s still time to fill out and mail back the census questionnaire,” Groves said. “Every household that fails to send back their census form by mail must be visited by a census taker starting in May – at a significant taxpayer cost. The easiest and best way to be counted in the census is to fill out and return your form by mail.”
The bureau is preparing to send duplicate questionnaires to residents of areas deemed “hard to count” because of factors such as language, poverty and low return rates in previous censuses.
Wire services contributed to this report.
