EVANSVILLE -- It's not a mad rush, but you could say there's real urgency -- and some controversy -- swirling around the 2020 census now.
Throughout the year the U.S. Census Bureau, its Evansville office and local government have blitzed residents with mailers, ad campaigns and ground-level outreach. And it has mostly worked. Census data shows that as of Friday, 69.7 percent of census-identified households in Vanderburgh County have responded online, by mail or by phone.
But the time to pick off the stragglers -- people who still haven't responded -- is running short. The Census Bureau had planned to end the counting phase of the decennial census on Oct. 31, but it made the controversial decision a month ago to move up the deadline to Sept. 30. The matter is in litigation -- but for now at least, Sept. 30 is the end.
The finality of it and all the money at stake -- the census helps direct hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private sector spending annually -- should stir stragglers to act while they still can, said Metropolitan Development Director Kelley Coures.
"Less than a month from now, the census ends," said Coures, city government's point man for the endeavor. "The collection of data – those canvassers that work for the Census Bureau, will all leave the streets. Whatever they’ve counted, Sept. 30 is it."
So between now and then, federal enumerators working out of the Evansville Area Census Office will take the questionnaire to your door – literally – if you haven't already completed it. The local office, which serves most of southern Indiana, began sending workers into the field to help people complete the form in July.
In addition to that, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Thursday it is sending a final mailing -- an additional paper questionnaire -- to more than 16.2 million households in low-responding census tracts around the country. The bureau called it "the last in a series of reminders" it has mailed to non-responding households since mid-March.
The deadline to complete and mail back the questionnaire: Sept. 30.
Census rates show two Vanderburgh Counties
To localize the Census Bureau's "Self-Response by Census Tract" is to behold two Vanderburgh Counties.
Tracts in the booming northern section of the county, where population and housing growth have rolled onward for three decades, show high rates of self-response to the census. Rates between 80 and 90 percent.
But in places like Pigeon Township, Evansville's Southeast Side, Jacobsville, low rates of self-response guarantee that's where federal enumerators will come knocking.
A census taker sat in her car outside a house on the Southeast Side after 7 p.m. Thursday, preparing a note to be left at the doorstep. Whoever lives there wasn't home.
"It says you can fill it out online," the enumerator said.
Enumerators make a point of coming into low-response areas between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., the census worker said, when people are coming home from work.
The work of the enumerators isn't reflected in the tract-level self-response data the Census Bureau displays. The census responses they get do show up in the total household completion rate, which is 92.3 percent for Indiana as of Friday. The number is not available for counties.
They are knocking on doors at Kennedy Towers and Buckner Towers in Downtown Evansville, too, where signs staked outside the public housing facilities tell residents "It's Not Too Late" to complete the census. Residents and workers at the buildings say enumerators are allowed in, whereupon they present a list of targeted apartments before venturing inside to see if the units are still occupied.
Kennedy and Buckner are in Census Tract 18, which showed Vanderburgh County's lowest self-response rate Friday at 40.2 percent.
"When you see the total response rate and self-response rate, remember you’re only talking about an estimated 649 residents, as of the 2016 American Community Survey census estimate," Coures said. "Kennedy and Buckner are 30, 40 percent of that."
The numbers will be scrambled a bit this time, though, because of the Post House, a new luxury apartment complex. It fills the remaining space in the block of the renovated Greyhound station, now a Bru Burger Bar location at Sycamore and Third streets.
"This block again is going to become a source of great vibrancy for our community, where people can literally live, work and play and make our city the city we all want it to be," Mayor Lloyd Winnecke said at a ribbon cutting a month ago.
Tina Scott doesn't know much about ribbon cuttings or the Post House's posh amenities, although she does share residency in Tract 18 by virtue of living in Buckner Towers.
The middle-aged Scott said she completed the census this year online. It was her first time.
Why?
"Because I didn’t know (any) better," Scott said outside Buckner. She said completing the questionnaire took "no time at all."
Over at Kennedy Towers, resident Donna Boyer cited a litany of personal disasters to explain why she hasn't completed the 2020 census.
Her mailbox key went missing, Boyer said outside the building. She needs a new key to retrieve the census form. Also, someone went through her apartment and stole things.
"It’s really been hard. Even my car was taken at one point there, so it’s really disturbed my normal routine," she said.
Boyer said she is on disability. She knows she could benefit from some of the government money Evansville could receive with a good census showing.
"It’s real important, though, for funding, isn’t it? I know. I know," she said.
Here's how high the stakes are
Local census takers can't stop canvassing and won't stop. The stakes are too high.
The census determines each state's share of seats in Congress, Electoral College votes, federal tax dollars for Medicare, Medicaid and other public services and all kinds of other federal money. Money for roads and highways, water and sewer lines, broadband and other services. Property tax money from companies who might relocate to Evansville, but who want to look at the census figures first. There's so much to all this.
"It's all of our federal assistance and, many times, your assistance from the state," Coures said last year.
One prominent example: roughly $3 million in federal funds the city allocates annually to agencies that help low-income and homeless populations.
"That $3 million basket of federal funds is all based on a formula that comes out of our census data, our percentage of low- to moderate-income population – the percent of the population that's in poverty," Coures said. "All those things are a formula that (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) uses, and it's based on census data."
The Census Bureau itself has published a list of the ways "the Census benefits your community."
The federal money available as a result of census results can be staggering.
In its report, "Counting for Dollars 2020," the George Washington Institute of Public Policy reported that Indiana received nearly $18 billion from 55 large federal spending programs in fiscal year 2016 that was "guided by data derived from the 2010 census."
"As directed by Congress, several hundred federal financial assistance programs rely on data derived from the Decennial Census to guide the geographic distribution of funds to states, counties, cities and households," the report stated.
The federal money Evansville gets significantly benefits people who live in places like Tract 18, Coures said.
"These areas are where people live who need that assistance we get for housing, for health, for daycare operations," he said. "It’s the areas where people live who hesitate to respond to the census that benefit from responding to the census.
"It's against their own self-interest not to."
About that Sept. 30 deadline
It has been called the largest peacetime government project in the country. So coming in a presidential election year in politically polarized America, the census was bound to find controversy.
A group of cities, counties and civil rights groups alleged in court filings more than a week ago that the Census Bureau ended the count on Sept. 30 to accommodate President Donald Trump's July memorandum seeking to bar people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the headcount as congressional districts are redrawn.
Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lower chanber of Congress, are redistributed every 10 years based on changes in population disclosed in the census.
Including people here illegally in the count, Trump said, “would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government.”
But critics said counting everyone living in the country means counting literally everyone. They say Trump, and by extension the Census Bureau, have no authority to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the census.
"President Trump can’t pick and choose. He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, told the Associated Press. “We will see him in court, and win, again."
More than a half-dozen other lawsuits are challenging Trump’s order, which civil rights groups call an unconstitutional attempt to curtail the political power of Latinos and immigrants of color.
Government attorneys argue the president has broad discretion to exclude people who are in the country illegally from the apportionment count. The filing by cities, counties and civil right groups asks a federal judge to stop the Census Bureau from ending the head count on Sept. 30.
In the meantime, local census takers will keep knocking on doors and hoping to pick up stragglers. Coures knows the Sept. 30 deadline infuses their work with urgency.
"Cutting it off a month is probably not going to help," he said.