The TV ads all said the same thing: Don’t respond to the 2000 U.S. Census survey and your community will lose out when benefits are calculated. The only problem with that is not one citizen of at least town even received a survey to complete.
Jeddo, Pennsylvania, just north of Big Black Creek, is located about 80 miles north of Philadelphia, and is the ultimate in the proverbial blink-and-you-missed-it-all flavor of rural towns and communities throughout America.
If you listen to what the residents of the small hamlet told Associated Press reporters back on April 6, you will believe the
U.S. Census Bureau when looking at their maps. No one, said first-term May Clyde Warner, a 58-year-old lifelong resident of
Jeddo, received a census form.
"Some people were a little mad," he said. "They are feeling left out."
The Census Bureau is mandated to count every man, woman, and child who was living (or alive) in the United States on April 1, 2000. The census is mandated, by the Constitution, to be conducted every ten years, with a full report going to Congress. The information Congress receives from the census is used, in today’s society, to calculate how much money each community in the nation receives from the federal government. Because of that incentive, however slight for
Jeddo, which boasts an annual budget of a whopping $7,000, the residents still felt slighted. And rightly so. They are supposed to be counted. It’s the law of the land.
Well, Warner started receiving calls from residents when census forms weren’t being received. He called Washington in early April, clinging to high hopes of resolving the matter and having duplicate forms sent.
As it turns out, Jeddo, which had only 53 homes that hold a total of 121 residents on six occupied acres and one main road, isn’t qualified to receive census forms.
When Warner started receiving complaints, he was quick to act. You see, Warner is under a lot of pressure locally on another issue. He is resisting pressures to merge his small hamlet, which he has called home since birth, with a large neighbor town. That isn’t something Warner wants.
Once contacted by Warner, officials in D.C. were quick to reply to Warner. Once they found the town on the map. Warner was told the Census Bureau’s mailing list department did not forget the town. In fact, he was told, the town didn’t qualify for mailings because no one in town has a street address.
What?
You see, Census Bureau officials explained, questionnaires are only sent to street address, not rural route numbers or post office boxes, which are used by all residents in
Jeddo.
No sir. A rural route address, such as Joe Smith, RR 1, Box 9-A,
Jeddo, PA. is no good for census mailings. The rural route address is just fine, however, for local, state, and federal tax forms. It’s also just fine for local police and fire departments. It’s also fine for the U.S. Postal Service. It’s not fine, however, with the agency that is supposed to count each person alive and living in the United States on April 1 every ten years, however.
Of course not. You see, census workers, those fine people who go door-to-door, will hand-deliver 2000 census forms to the residents of
Jeddo, as they will in much of rural Pennsylvania, as well as every other state where street addresses in the local community are rare. Those same census workers will also do countless interviews at addresses that appear on the census rolls but no census form was received.
"All of those people will be hand-enumerated," said Andrea King, a census spokesman in the Philadelphia office. "We didn’t miss them."
No, the government isn’t going to miss counting a warm body. Especially when they know they are going to count on that person each year on April 15.
The whole problem is easy to understand, you see. The Census Bureau doesn’t mail census forms to rural route addresses because they have no idea if they form will be delivered, is my guess. It’s not good enough for the official people-counting bureau of the federal government to use rural addresses to mail forms to, but those same addresses, when printed on paper and handed to census workers as addresses, are just fine.
It’s cheaper to mail a form than it is to pay a census worker to go to rural communities, try to find where RR2, Box 89-C is located, go to the door, knock, and then begin asking questions. Maybe that’s the idea. Keep costs as high as possible. Use people to find millions of Americans in rural America. Don’t use the stamp machine and postal employees. That could reduce costs. It could save thousands, perhaps millions of federal tax dollars. That just wouldn’t make sense.
So it goes. Another bureaucracy takes the people by the throat. First the census bureau hits the taxpayers up to pay for postage for all the census forms that are mailed out to all parts of America. The the second way you are grabbed by the throat is when the census workers get you when they knock on the door and ask all the pre-printed questions that do not have to be answered by anyone. It takes almost 90 minutes from what I’ve heard from people who’ve done census work in the past. The only question on the entire census form that is **required, by law,** to be answered by everyone is how many people live (or lived) at the residence (hence the “counting” of all living people in America) on April 1. Then taxpayers are hit in the purse a second time. This time it’s to pay the wages for thousands of census workers, especially the ones who traveled to rural America to individually count each rural
resident.
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"Did
the Census Bureau Forget to Count Some People?"
