It's all about numbers, but it isn't as easy as 1, 2, 3.
The U.S. Census Bureau counts the nation's population every 10 years, and our number is up. How many people respond to a 10-question survey slated to arrive in area mailboxes next March will affect how much political clout the state has, and how much federal money it gets.
Mendocino County hosted a U.S. Census Bureau regional conference Friday that also included Del Norte, Siskiyou, Humboldt, Trinity and Lake counties.
"We could lose a congressional seat - that's huge," Census 2010 Director Ditas Katague told an audience gathered inside the Fine Arts Building at the Mendocino Fairgrounds for the conference and workshop.
She continued, "That means a sitting guy or gal that we have in D.C. is going to have to clean out their office and give it to somebody from Texas, Oregon, Nevada ... and we don't want to do that. There's going to be stimulus dollars, and we want to make sure that California has a voice."
Organizers have six months to gather workers and prime the community for counting. One of the major tasks is convincing the people who receive the surveys that to "stand up and be counted," they don't risk losing privacy or a lot of time.
"It's easy, it's safe, it's important," bureau Partnership Specialist Barbara Ferry said.
The "easy" part involves one number: 10.
"It's really very simple," Ferry said. "Ten minutes. In fact we say 10, 10, 10: 10 minutes, every 10 years, 10 questions."
The person who fills out the survey is considered the head of household, and the bureau wants to know the other household members' relationships to that person, along with everyone's name, age, date of birth, race, gender and whether the home is owned or rented.
The "safe" part is ensured by the fact that information on the surveys is confidential, and can only be used for statistical purposes. Personal information can't be revealed for 72 years.
"Even President Obama could not get anyone's individual information if he wanted to," Ferry said.
Census workers who break the lifetime oath they take and reveal personal information collected during the census can be charged with a federal crime, punishable by a $500,000 fine and five years in prison.
But standing up and being counted isn't as popular - or as easy - as the U.S. Census Bureau needs it to be. The bureau asked attendees to suggest ways to make sure people are counted who are usually hardest to reach, either by mail or in person.
About 59 percent of Mendocino County s residents filled out and returned the surveys they got in the mail for the 2000 census, according to officials.
That was more than was expected, according to Mendocino County Assistant CEO Alison Glassey. She said it was so much more than expected that it "threw off projections, and they thought there had been a population growth, instead of just better response."
Officials are reaching out to outlying areas, to populations that are typically hard to reach, to get the most accurate count possible.
Census information from 2000 indicates 13.8 percent of Mendocino County's 86,265 residents were hard to reach. "Hard-to-count" populations include renters, people living in households with more than one family, children and people in outlying areas.
Maps lined the walls of the meeting room. One map showed that the northeastern quarter of Mendocino County was considered by the bureau to be one of the hardest local areas to count.
"It's a large area that's sparsely populated," Glassey said. "People who live out in these areas are sometimes out there because they don't want to be found."
County Supervisor John Pinches noted another reason people don't return the mail surveys, and the reason he wasn't counted in the 2000 census: the surveys can't be sent to a post office box.
Attendees were asked to write suggestions for reaching people in remote areas.
The other area considered one of the hardest to survey in the county is an area on the southern tip of Ukiah that stretches into the unincorporated area to the south.
The northwest region of Mendocino County was given a mid-range score on the bureau's difficulty scale. On an adhesive note placed on the map in that area, Pinches wrote, "Some private growing areas perhaps best reached with tables near the post office."
The southern end of Mendocino County was also given a mid-range difficulty score. A sticky note there written by Phil Dow of the Lake County/City Area Planning Council said, "Center of all activity in Gualala seems to be the post office."
The U.S. Census Bureau is working with the Mendocino County Health and Human Services Agency, the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, North Coast Opportunities, Mendocino Council of Governments, Northern California Indian Development Council, the Lake County/City Area Planning Council, Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District and Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
Census 2010 has a Facebook page, "California Complete Count - Census 2010"; a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/CACensus2010; and a Web site at www.census.ca.gov.
Tiffany Revelle can be reached at udjtr@pacific.net, or at 468-3523.
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