Census is coming

March 4th, 2010 | By Jai Garg | Section: Article

With every new decade comes a myriad of fads, quirky musical styles and hip clothing trends. While these factors continuously change, there is one constant in American public life that has and will continue to stay constant— the U.S. Census.

Mandated by the U.S. Constitution and administered by the U.S. Census Bureau every 10 years, the census determines government funding, electoral seats and congressional alignment.

While its up to the U.S. government to determine the actual statistics through census reports, the local governments play an essential role in the process.

According to the Ryan Ness, the Building and Planning Assistant for the City of Grinnell, Grinnell sends the U.S. Government a map of the boundaries of Grinnell. Once that is determined, it is important for those addresses and boundaries to be verified.

“Addressing is the next phase of [the project], they gave us a list of addresses, and then have somebody, a non-city employee, go out and canvass the city,” Ness said. “Doing that, you can imagine problems come up, a house not having a number on there or a property that doesn’t meet the current usage.”

Once the canvasser files the reports, the city can then challenge the rulings.

“You get an [offsheet] and we can petition the addressing if we like,” Ness said. “We petitioned about 30 addresses total, that we went through and verified—a trailer that didn’t have the right address, stuff like that.”

At that point, the local government has to remove itself from the process. That being said, there are certain things the city of Grinnell can verify.

As far as any demographic changes, according to Duane Neff, Director of Building and Planning for the city of Grinnell, the population will most likely go up by 100 people since 2000.

And if you students were wondering, you will be counted as a Grinnell, Iowa resident.

“The census is based on where you are living and if you living there nine months of the year,” Ness said. “I remember when I was in Missouri for school I filled out the form, so [the college students] do get counted.”