Indianapolis is in a desperate hunt to fill as many as 5,000 part-time Census workers with a fast-approaching deadline to begin the population count.
U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Indianapolis, and Republican Mayor Greg Ballard, appearing at a joint news conference in Haughville, said officials are hamstrung by having no local advertising budget, which hurts in recruiting people to work their neighborhoods. Among their targets: Asian, Latino and African-American neighborhoods.
Bureau is significantly behind in its recruiting in Indianapolis. We have to step up to the plate,” Carson told reporters. “Each person counted means literally thousands in federal funding.”
“It is imperative that we are able to carry out the grassroots efforts to count every person, and the success of that efforts rests in the hands of the men and women who will be employed in these important jobs,” Ballard said. “Unfortunately, as of the end of (January) the Census Bureau remained more than 5,000 people short of their recruitment goal for our community, so I encourage anyone interested in this opportunity to take advantage now.”
The timing is crucial.
Questionnaires are expected to arrive in local homes this month and March. From April through July, census-takers will visit homes of residents who did not return their questionnaires, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The first data from the census will be released in March
2011.
The jobs pay $12 to $15 per hour, and they are on-call positions.
“At the end of a day it’s a job, and it’s a good job,” Carson said.
Officials are trying every approach they can think of, including reaching out to the unemployed and tell them the jobless can still do the short-term census count and continue to draw unemployment benefits, said Marc Lotter, spokesman for the Department of Workforce Development.
Some 9,500 workers will be hired to count all of Marion County. Officials haven’t had as much of a problem recruiting census-counters in affluent suburban Marion County, said Sue Gettz, a local Census office manager.
Amos Brown, radio talk show and co-chair of the Complete Count Committee, said the worker shortfall seems to be evenly spread throughout the particular census boundaries — all of Center Township, the lower third of Washington Township, Wayne Township from Tibbs Avenue to the White River, Warren Township from Emerson to Arlington avenues, and the Southside from Troy Avenue to the I-465 beltway.
“This is the area that we have a large amount of the hard-to-count,” Brown said. “It’s an area where we have caught heck in not getting applicants.”
Visit http://2010.census.gov/2010censusjobs or contact the Census office at (317) 616-4670.
