Census work begins in March

Mark your calendar for March 12 – the day to expect arrival in the mail of the U.S. Census Bureau’s first letter to 120 million households nationwide.

No, it’s not a scam. The federal government is gearing up for its every-10-year study of population trends and other demographics, and local leaders want you to know it’s perfectly legitimate.

Neal Dollar, a specialist with the Census Bureau’s Sarasota-Bradenton field office, is making the rounds of local town halls to explain the significance of the process and how it will work.

Dollar recently explained the web-based count begins with a letter mailed to residential addresses, each with a unique passcode to access the online questionnaire. He said federal dollars, reapportioning of Congressional seats and other factors are on the line.

“We want to count everyone in the house, whether you’re a baby or whether you’re a senior adult,’’ he said. “Everyone gets counted.’’

Florida gained a pair of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives following the 2010 count, and New York lost two seats. About $675 billion in federal funds is distributed via Census data, Dollar said.

Winter visitors may receive a Census notification here and at their permanent residence. Dollar said only one should be filled out, and duplicates would likely be flagged for human review based on names and dates of birth.

This is the first year for a Census being primarily completed via the internet, though Dollar said there are alternate means of filling out the data for those not comfortable with technology.

“A, logistically, it’s a lot easier to do it that way when we do the count and the other reason is you get instantaneous results,’’ Dollar said. ”When you hit ‘submit’ it immediately populates our database and we can see that residence has taken part.’’

He said it was important to aim for full compliance. In 2010, Florida’s rate of return was 74% and Sarasota County’s was 75%.  Dollar said the 2010 count missed 1 million kids under 5 nationwide.

Longboat Key Town Commissioner Ken Schneier, during a recent presentation, asked how the bureau knew how many people were missed.

Dollar said the Bureau follows up with smaller, American Community Surveys, analyzes school enrollment patterns  and applies some measure of estimation to ascertain who and how many were missed.