RGG: Guardian to focus heavily on Census 2010
Submitted by Southern Shift on Mon, 2009-12-21 15:02
Authored by Rio Grande Guardian Editorial Board
Original Article
EDINBURG, Dec. 21 - Forget Bill White, Farouk Shami, Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison. The big political issue in the Rio Grande Valley in the first few months of the New Year will be Census 2010.
The Census Bureau will send out its forms to every household in March. The more accurate and complete the count, the more federal dollars will come to the region over the course of the next decade. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, not to mention the fact that the Valley could gain an extra congressional seat.
“The Census is huge,” René Ramirez told the Guardian, in his first interview after being named the new Hidalgo County Judge last month. “It plays such a big role in how the federal government allocates funding.”
The Census is taken every ten years. Ramirez pointed out that in 1990 only 55 percent of households in Hidalgo County filled out the Census forms the first go round. That meant Census workers had to go out and try to persuade those residents who had let the forms gather dust to fill them out. Although the completion rate improved, there was a severe undercount for one of the fastest growing counties in the nation.
Ramirez said he planned to make the issue one of his top priorities in his year in charge of Hidalgo County. “For multiple reasons we have got to get an accurate showing. We’ve to get every single person in this county involved and be part of the census,” Ramirez said. “Look at how fast our county is growing. How do we reach out to the hard-to-count residents? Through education, through public service announcements, through the media, maybe door-to-door canvassing? We have got to do whatever it takes.”
Read the full story here.
