News

2010 Census forms begin to arrive in Wilson

Monday, March 15, 2010

Census forms are showing up in Wilson this week. The City of Wilson encourages you to fill out the short form – a procedure that should take about 10 minutes or less– and mail it back by April 1, the official date of the 2010 Census.

An estimated $400 billion in federal funding, including money for schools, roads, health care and other critical programs, is distributed annually to local governments based on population figures.

Local leaders need an accurate count both to plan and pay for services. If Wilson officially passes 50,000 in population, the community would become eligible for some federal grants and other benefits.

If every household in the U.S. returned the forms quickly, taxpayers would save an estimated $1.5 billion in the expense of sending Census workers door-to-door.

“It's a lot less expensive to get responses back by mail than it is to send census takers to knock on doors of households that failed to respond,” Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves said Monday. “It costs the government just 42 cents for a postage paid envelope when a household mails back the form. It costs $57 to send a census taker door-to-door to follow up with each household that fails to respond.”

This year’s Census form is the shortest in a lifetime, Groves said.

The federal government had mandated a Census every decade since 1790. It was begun as a way to ensure that Congress is fairly reapportioned every 10 years between the states. Census counts are also used to redraw state and local legislative boundaries so that political representation is fairly distributed across their changing populations.

All U.S. residents are required to participate in the Census. All census responses are confidential; they are protected by law and not shared with anyone, including tribal housing authorities, other federal agencies and law enforcement entities. All Census Bureau employees take the oath of nondisclosure and are sworn for life to protect the confidentiality of the data. The penalty for unlawful disclosure is a fine of up to $250,000, imprisonment of up to five years or both.