Time to make it count

COEUR d'ALENE - The questions should have hit your mailbox Monday.

Answer them and send them back.

Otherwise the government will come looking for you, which will cost it more money.

Monday marked the first day questionnaires for the 2010 Census were mailed across Idaho, but all of Coeur d'Alene should have theirs by now.

"It's another piece of mail for us," said Dave Hoover, Coeur d'Alene postmaster. "It's not really anything dramatic from our normal workload."

The 10-question surveys are only going to homes, and Coeur d'Alene's 23,000 households should all have theirs by Monday, he said.

Once they get it, answer it and put it back in the mail, said Kris Grimshaw, assistant manager for recruiting at the Boise Census office. Otherwise for each non-responsive address, the Census Bureau will send someone to the address next month to fill out the form and complete the count.

For each of those, it costs the government around $57 per household instead of 42 cents for a (discounted) postage-paid envelope, she said.

"I'll probably send it back right away," said Clayton Jasper of Post Falls, who received his Monday. "It's a good thing if you're going to get your roads and your buildings and stuff paid for."

If you don't, then your area won't get its fair share of funding, he said, since the constitutionally required tally determines the apportioning of congressional districts, as well as the allocation of federal funding for hospitals, law enforcement, job training centers and schools.

The questions ask the names of who lives in the household as of April 1, 2010, if the home is rented or owned by mortgage, and the phone number and birthdate of the addressee, among others.

Nicole Jasper said she wasn't worried that the questions would give up too much private information to the government.

"It doesn't hurt anything to do it," she said. "But everybody thinks the government is going to get them anyway."

The Census Bureau is aiming for around a 70 percent compliance rate returning the once-a-decade questions through the mail.

"What will happen this year I'm not sure, but statistically that's what we try to get," Grimshaw said. "We don't know how the foreclosure rates and all the vacant homes will affect us."

Around 134 million households across the county are expected to receive the questionnaire.

If everyone in the U.S. mailed back their forms, $1.5 billion would be saved, according to the Census Bureau.