Officials push 2010 census campaign in Detroit

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

Detroit -- Widespread participation in the 2010 census is vitally important, said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Dennis F. Hightower.

On his second official trip to Detroit, Hightower joined Lt. Gov. John D. Cherry at Cadillac Place this morning to kick off Michigan's 2010 Census awareness campaign, "It's in Our Hands, Michigan."

Hightower said the count will directly determine how $400 billion in federal funds are allocated to state and local governments.

"And with states across the country teetering on economic red ink, this money will be significant," Hightower said.

The census, conducted every 10 years, is the federal government's biggest peacetime effort.

As many as 1.2 million staffers will be working to get everyone counted in Michigan, Hightower said.

For the effort, about 24,000 people will be hired in the state at a pay range of $11.25 to $19.50 an hour, Cherry said.

Cherry, who is head of Michigan's Complete Count Committee, said that much is at stake with the count.

For every person not counted, the state loses $10,000 to other states over the course of 10 years. That's money that goes towards health care, transportation, education, environment, housing, poverty relief and several other social services, he said.

"You can see why being counted is so important in terms of dollars and cents," Cherry said.

Michigan has the additional challenge of having the most seasonal residents, or "snowbirds," of any state in the country.

With so much of this population counted in the wrong state in 2000, roughly $200 million was spent annually in states other than Michigan, Cherry said. And Michigan would not have lost a congressional seat then had there been an accurate count, he added.

The state has launched an informational Web site to instruct those residents on how to get counted, at www.michigan.gov/census2010.

Misinformation about the census -- that it could be used by local police or immigration officials -- still plagues some communities, making an accurate count challenging, Hightower said.

By law, it is forbidden for census employees to share data with law enforcement or reveal any identifying data culled from the census, he said.

For the first time, the census will be printed in bilingual Spanish and English, as well as Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean and Russian.

Once the census forms are mailed out in March, residents are urged to return them by April in order to reduce the cost to taxpayers of having staffers dispatched to communities to retrieve them.

cjun@detnews.com (313) 222-2019