LOGAN – This year will no doubt be remembered for one thing – the year of COVID-19 and its major disruption of life in this country and worldwide. But it is also a Census year and it is imperative for every state to get an accurate count of everyone. It affects federal funding for education, it can also affect emergency response.
It can also affect decisions made by the state legislature, cities, counties and more. The good news is the response has been great in the state of Utah.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Thursday, assistant regional census manager Jerome Garza said statewide 61.9 percent of housing units have already answered the census, this ranks the state at No. 12 in the nation. He had even better news for local response.
“If I even look at the City of Logan, they’re at 66.7 percent of…housing units have already answered the census in three easy methods. For the first time, you can go online www.2020census.gov. You can call on the phone: 844-330-2020, or you can answer that questionnaire that we will be delivering to the households,” said Garza.
He said doing the census is not hard or time consuming. It consists of 10 easy questions. Garza said on March 12th they were hand-delivering census materials to rural-routed addresses or P.O. Box addresses. Five days later, the coronavirus shut down census operations. S,o many of those housing units have not had an opportunity yet to answer the census.
“Until this week,” Garza exclaimed. “We’ve restarted operations in Utah, and we did this after a long period of strong evaluation, changing our procedures, so that, number one and most importantly, we are protecting the safety of not only the American people who reside in those households, but our employees, who go out to each of the doors and drop off those questionnaires.”
Garza said they will not knock on doors, but simply drop off the questionnaire at a housing unit and leave. For more information: www.2020census.gov