Census workers ready to complete their task

By YADAMSUREN BORCHULUUN of the Tribune's staff
Story ran on Sunday, July 16 2000

U.S. census workers will make their final push beginning Wednesday by knocking on the doors of 2,959 Boone County households.

In all, 650 enumerators working with the Columbia census office will visit more than 30,000 of the estimated 325,000 households in the 21-county area for which they’re responsible. The operation is intended to check on new homes and those classified as vacant or deleted in previous census counts.

Local census manager Bob Bellinghausen said new houses will be enumerated if they were occupied by April 1. Otherwise, he said, tenants should have been counted at their old addresses.
Bellinghausen said houses were classified as "vacant" if counters failed after several attempts to find someone in the house. "The census workers checked those houses up to six times and informed neighbors," he said.

Bellinghausen said there aren’t so many vacant houses in Boone County, which has an estimated 60,000 households. "We have quite a few new homes in Boone," he said. "If the house was occupied by April 1, it will be reconfirmed."

The enumerators will also check "deleted" houses, or those that might have been moved, torn down or otherwise destroyed.

When census workers find people in vacant or deleted homes, they’ll gather information on the number of people there and other data for a 2000 "snapshot" of the United States being compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tenants will fill out one of two questionnaires, Bellinghausen said. "The short questionnaires with five to six questions will take 10 minutes to fill in, and the long ones with the 50 questions will take 45 to 60 minutes," he said.

"One out of six households will fill out the long questionnaire," Bellinghausen said. A computer randomly selects which homes get which forms.

Most households will be contacted between 5 and 10 p.m. "Catching people at home is the biggest challenge," Bellinghausen said.

Sixty enumerators will work in Boone County. They wear official ID badges and never ask to enter a home.

Bellinghausen expects to finish the operation in 10 to 14 days and to close the Columbia office sometime around the end of August.

Cindy Mustard, a member of a local advisory committee that helped inform citizens about the importance of filling out census forms, said she suspects the current return rate is about normal for this stage of the process.

Her agency, the Voluntary Action Center, serves a clientele that is primarily low-income. She said each client received fliers about how funding for programs is linked to census results.

"One place where you really see a difference is when there is a real disaster, like a hurricane or a tornado," she said. "A lot of federal government aid would be based on having a higher percentage of impoverished people."

Still, Mustard doesn’t believe low-income people are any less likely than wealthy people to respond to the census. "There are just a lot of people who don’t send it in for one reason or another."