Pickens County residents are stepping up to the plate in 2010 with this year’s census participation rates beating both the national average and Pickens’ 2000 mail return rates.
The Census Bureau (www.2010.census.gov/cgi-bin/staterates.cgi), reported 74 percent of Pickens County residents who were mailed a census form have returned the questionnaire as of April 19.
That’s 10 percentage points higher than Pickens’ 2000 census return rate of 64 percent and five points higher than the current national average of 69 percent.
The mail participation rate is the percentage of forms mailed back by households that have received them, the US Census Bureau’s website says.
But Pickens’ higher-than-average return rate is despite next to no Big Canoe residents receiving, or returning, their census forms.
“That number is good,” said Pickens County’s Sole Commissioner Rob Jones, “but it should go up when the Big Canoe issue is resolved.”
The vast majority of Big Canoe residents did not receive census forms because all forms addressed to Big Canoe residents were addressed with lot numbers, not street addresses or mailbox numbers, according to a local US Post Office official.
Big Canoe residents do not have mailboxes at their homes. They use a central mailroom with post office boxes.
The census forms mailed to Big Canoe residents did not have residents’ names printed on them, the postal official said, only lot numbers and a street name that corresponded with the number. This lot number/street name address is what it used by parcel carriers such as FedEx and UPS that take packages to residents’ front doors.
USPS mail carriers, however, cannot deliver directly to Big Canoe homes due to the absence of a physical mailbox at the residence.
“This is what you get into when everyone’s not running on the same page,” Commissioner Jones said.
After officials from the post office contacted the census bureau regarding the delivery issue, post office officials received a letter from the federal agency saying the questionnaires were indeed undeliverable and that a door-to-door count would be necessary.
Big Canoe officials and residents have been scrambling to find a way to have the forms mailed to their post boxes. According to Big Canoe POA Coordinator Glenda Wood, the Census Bureau sent a letter to Big Canoe officials last week stating it was possible to have the forms mailed if each resident called a special number to make a request.
It is unclear at this time how many Big Canoe residents have received a census form by making a special request, but Wood said one resident who called the number said the bureau representative he spoke with was not familiar with the special request forms.
There has been concern that census workers who travel door-to-door in Big Canoe will have a difficult time navigating the near 100 miles of curvy roads, not to mention pinning down residents of the community who do not use their residence full time.
According to Wood, there are approximately 1,426 homes on the Pickens County side of Big Canoe and approximately 1,054 homes on the Dawson County side. There are approximately 1,400 that are full-time residences in the gated community, she said.
Jones did say that, barring the Big Canoe debacle, the rest of the county “has worked out really well. The way we have been advertising and made public the importance of the census, it has really helped,” he said. “And people just seem to be more interested in the census and the politics of the federal government this year.”
To the south, Cherokee County also has a mail participation rate of 74 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Dawson County has a 70 percent participation rate.
The Census Bureau’s door-to-door campaign will begin on May 1, 2010. |
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