Locally Hired Census Workers to Update Address List, Visit Every Residence in San Joaquin County

The Census Bureau is entering the first major phase of the 2008 Census Dress Rehearsal after months of recruiting hundreds of people from San Joaquin County.

Now through the end of June, 480 locally hired workers will update the Census Bureau’s address list — verifying, adding and deleting addresses. This is the first major phase of the dress rehearsal for the 2010 Census. The dress rehearsal will be conducted in San Joaquin County, Calif., and in a nine-county area around Fayetteville, N.C.

“The foundation of an accurate 2010 Census — and a census dress rehearsal — is an accurate address list,” said Ralph Lee, director of the Census Bureau’s Seattle Regional Office. “If we don’t know where to send the census form, the people living at that address might not be counted.”

Since the last census, an estimated 29,000 housing units and 101,000 people have been added to San Joaquin County. All of California, with its own estimated gain of 774,000 housing units and 2.2 million people, will be canvassed for new addresses in the spring of 2009 for the 2010 Census.

To help ensure the accuracy of the census and improve its efficiency, the Census Bureau has moved away from using pencil and paper to update its address lists and maps. Now, census workers will update the information electronically, using hand-held computers and coordinates from the Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS coordinates will be added to each residential structure to make sure it’s recorded within the correct city, county or other geographic unit — which is particularly important when lines for Congressional and state legislature districts are redrawn. The dress rehearsal serves as the Census Bureau’s final opportunity to fine-tune its plans for collecting data with the hand-held computers.

Residents can easily identify census workers by their official badges, hand-held computers and census bags.