Stakes, challenges high for counting every Georgian, getting every dollar

By Dan Chapman

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Besides its role in allocating seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. census is used when divvying up federal dollars.

And that role becomes more crucial this year as cash-strapped communities across Georgia scramble to provide police protection, public education and passable roads.

In 2000, during the last count of the nation’s population, tens of thousands of Georgians went unrecorded. One study pegged the loss to Georgia at more than $200 million in federal social service dollars over 10 years.

It's no surprise that this time, Georgia officials are gearing up for a more complete count. But the challenges, like the stakes, are huge.

Despite a well-publicized outreach in 2000, only 65 percent of Georgians returned the census questionnaire by mail. (The national average was 67 percent.) Federal enumerators – census workers who personally tried to track down every U.S. citizen – and other federal databases significantly bolstered the state’s overall count.

But PricewaterhouseCoopers, a national accounting firm, estimated that 122,980 Georgians weren’t tallied in 2000. More than 17,000 people in Fulton County alone weren’t counted, it said.

Consequently, Georgia would lose at least $209 million worth of federal funding for Medicaid and other social-service programs between 2002 and 2012, the accountants said. Only California and Texas, they said, would lose more.

“Any community that suffers an undercount will see their federal funding affected  for the next 10 years,” said Diana Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Census Bureau in Atlanta.

Yet rural Georgia and some population groups are at a distinct disadvantage, some say.

The federal government won’t mail census forms to rural route addresses; census workers will physically deliver forms to those households. State officials fear that thousands of rural homes will be missed or residents won't be at home to accept the forms from census employees, who will not leave them at the houses. In 2000, the counts were estimated to be below 55 percent for large swaths of southeastern and southwestern Georgia.

Overall, Georgia, with an estimated population of 9.8 million, has picked up another 1.6 million residents since the last census. But many of those newcomers are government-leery immigrants -- mainly Latinos and Asians -- who may be unlikely to divulge personal information when the government comes asking.

Mike Beatty, commissioner of Community Affairs, and Debra Lyons, director of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Development, co-chair the state’s newly formed Complete Count Committee. Federal census officials grumble that Georgia, compared to Florida and other states, is getting a late start laying the grassroots framework for a successful count.

Lyons, though, said Georgia is in good shape. Gov. Sonny Perdue has appointed 43 government officials, businessmen and community leaders to the state committee charged with alerting every resident to the importance of the census.

Business, education and faith-based subcommittees will target employees, school kids and churchgoers, respectively. A Web site (www.census.georgia.gov) offers local groups the opportunity to download get-out-the-count material from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Lyons said she will deploy Facebook and Twitter to update local count committees, which are grassroots groups of volunteers. She's hoping to line up 250 of them to help implement the state committee's recommendations.

Other organizations such as the Georgia Latino Complete Count Committee -- which has already distributed 111,000 census-themed comic books -- have their own strategies.

Counting immigrants across Georgia, could prove doubly difficult. Some are here illegally. And even many immigrants in the country legally mistrust government.

“Misunderstanding is going to be our biggest challenge. Many people who speak English as a second language come from places that don’t do a census,” said Saralyn Stafford, a special assistant with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. “People feel it’s an invasion of privacy to fill out a census form, even though there are federal laws against sharing that information.”

The goal will be to convince every resident of the value of being counted.

“It is vitally important, as we’re going through economic hard times and with the state facing budget challenges, that we pull in the amount of federal money we are entitled to,” Stafford said. “The only way to do that is if we get everybody in Georgia to participate in the census.”