In 2010, Detroit, Michigan, had the worst U.S. Census response rate to the U.S. Census in America rate with only 64 percent of its households answering the survey. As a consequence, city officials said it not only lost a congressional seat, but left millions of dollars in federal aid sitting in Washington, D.C. This is money that they claim could have been used to boost local efforts to expand and improve important programs such as health care, education and moreal and other important programs.
Stung by this missed opportunity, Mayor Mike Duggan vowed, last week during a 2020 census panel discussion on the 2020 census at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Detroit Policy Conference, at the Motor City Casino, to redouble the city’s outreach effort to ensure that this it does not happen again. “I think most people know the census determines how much representation we have in Lansing and Washington,” he said. “It determines how much federal money there is, forrom everything from healthcare and housing to roads.…” “And people need to be counted.” The Census Bureau now estimates Detroit’s population at about 673,000, which reflects a 25 percent decline in city population from 2000 to 2010. However, city officials suspect as many as 27,000 households failed to respond to the 2010 U.S. Census. They believe a more accurate count will show a small increase in city growth.
Duggan said he suspected the anemic response from residents may have been related, in part, to all the distractions in the city and local government from the criminal trial of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick overlapping with a campaign for a new mayor. With all that going on, there was not enough time for the new city leadership to focus, much less mobilize for a project of this magnitude. “Detroit got hit pretty hard in 2010,” Duggan he said. “We had just gone through the transition from Kwame Kilpatrick to the new mayor and I think it came up kind of quickly and in 2010 Detroit had the worst response rate in America at 64 percent of the residents voluntarily turning in their forms before you go out and knock on the door.” Given the sense of urgency to get it right this time around, the mayor he announced plans for the city to will hire 100 new census workers and will raise as much money as needed to ensure maximum awareness of the official 2020 census count operations.
The new employees will be in addition join a team of to the thousands of current city census workers who are already hired or in the process of being hired by the federal government to gather information in southeast Michigan Reflecting on his own experience as a census worker while in college, Mayor Duggan said he is well aware that understands many members of minority communities are often much more reticent about divulging household information to government workers than white residents. “There is a level of distrust when you go to the home of somebody of color and ask how many bathrooms they have…they want to know why the government wants to know.” Still, Duggan and other local leaders and officials on the panel stressed the fact that too much is riding on an accurate count of the city’s population for residents to not take the survey seriously.
Thus, he promised a greater effort will be made to make it feel less intrusive. ITo back up that promise in January, he named Victoria Kovari, the city’s deputy director of the Department of Neighborhoods and executive director of the Detroit 2020 Census Campaign for the next two years, which will help the process.. Duggan proclaimed said she will lead the city’s outreach effort and will be both sensitive to concerns while still effectively striving to reach the city’s compliance goal. “We’re going to go do everything we can to get people counted,.” he said.
Kovari said it was critically important for city residents to become more engaged with the process and to take it more seriously. She says because an accurate count of the city population is not just a matter of civic pride, it determines how much money is distributed from the federal government back to the state and city. “So, filling out the census is just not an obligation or sometimes a nuisance,” she said. “It does directly impact people in their everyday lives through these programs.” Thinking about the job ahead of her, Kovari conceded it won’t be easy. “So, we have some real challenges in this census that we’re going to have to overcome, and we’re prepared to create a really robust campaign over the next 18 months to be able to do that,” she said.
About Post Author
