Census prep ongoing; $400 billion at stake
By Tony Dobrowolski, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
PITTSFIELD — They meet once a month behind closed doors.
They talk about ways to find you — and the repercussions if they don’t.
They talk about the millions of dollars that hinge on Berkshire County’s population, about the representation that could be lost.
They talk about just how badly Uncle Sam wants you.
They aren’t a secret society, but rather members of social service organizations, the federal government and the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission who gather at the BRPC’s second-floor conference room on Fenn Street.
Their mission: To discuss ways of locating Berkshire County residents in preparation for the 2010 U.S. Census, the constitutionally mandated head count of all U.S. residents that takes place every 10 years.
Forms containing 10 questions will be mailed to county residents in March, and the forms don’t have to be completed until April. All U.S. residents — citizens and non-citizens — are required to be counted, and officials want to make sure that as many Berkshire residents as possible are tallied.
The state’s annual share of $400 billion in federal funding is at stake over the next decade. Less participation means a lower head count, which means less federal funding for Berkshire County transportation projects such as the straightening of Pittsfield’s Park Square rotary, or less money for education programs that provide federal funding to local school districts.
The size of each state’s federal Congressional delegation also is determined by population statistics gleaned from the census.
“There are certain parts of the population that are traditionally harder to get to respond to the census,” said Nathaniel W. Karns, executive director of the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, which is working with U.S. Census Bureau officials to help local municipalities prepare for the count.
This group, the Berkshire Complete Count Committee, meets monthly at the BRPC. The U.S. Department of Commerce, which conducts the federal census, has established a local census office on West Housatonic Street in Pittsfield.
“The upper-middle-class family living in a suburban house probably responds to [the census form],” Karns said. “But the immigrant family or a collection of individuals living in an apartment probably will not.”
Karns said that in the Berkshires, municipal government involvement in preparing for the 2010 census is “fairly limited.” However, he said, several local municipalities did participate in an “address check program” the past two years. In that program, existing addresses were compared to a master list for accuracy.
“In Pittsfield, I heard that they discovered a portion of the homes on Dalton Division Road were not on the address list,” Karns said. “That’s 50 houses that might not have been counted in 2000. That could be 130 people that should have been counted. Start to multiply that by how many other streets.”
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