While saluting the flag and singing the national anthem, Missouri kicks off Census 2020

Efforts to count everyone in a 61-county area of southern Missouri for Census 2020 officially began Thursday morning with a "Census Open House" held in Commerce Department offices on the 11th floor of Springfield's Hammons Tower.

Local officials with Missouri's 2020 Census Complete Count Committee and others began promotional efforts to persuade families to "fill out their census."

A highly produced event, the open house required ID checks at the door and featured a mini-buffet with a red, white and blue dessert and tours of the facility. It kicked off with a full uniformed presentation of the colors and the singing of the national anthem.

April 1 is Census Day, said Bo Young, area census office manager, and the count has to be wrapped up, with population data sent to President Donald Trump, by Dec. 31.

"Our motto is to count everyone, to count them once, and to count them in the right place," Young told a crowd of dignitaries including Springfield Mayor Ken McClure, Branson Mayor Edd Akers and folks from state government and the nonprofit community.

"Hundreds of thousands" of staff will work on this year's once-in-a-decade census, Young said. This year's nationwide team of fieldworkers will include about 50,000 people, according to reporting by the Washington Post. That's one-third of the fieldworkers deployed in 2010, when the census was more reliant on paper forms and telephone calls. More of the action for this round will take place online.

The count is mandated every 10 years by the U.S. Constitution, and the population counts it provides allow for the reapportionment of each state's number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Missouri, which lost a representative during the 2010 census, has "no realistic chance" to gain or lose any seats this time, according to John Shikles, Gov. Mike Parson's director of census operations.

$16 billion at stake

Census data is also used for a host of other purposes by the government and the private sector, Shikles and others said.

"The biggest opportunity is the opportunity to get more federal funding," Shikles said. "Missouri gets $16 billion a year from federal funding. That’s directly calculated using census data."

He added, "This is really Missouri's opportunity to respond to get numbers (of the people who live here), for more money to our state, to our communities, for our roads, for our schools, for hospitals, for broadband and all kinds of programs that benefits our citizens."

Former Branson Mayor Karen Best, currently running for a seat in the Missouri House as a Republican, is Gov. Parson's appointed chair of the state Complete Count Committee. She spoke at the open house Thursday morning.

Best warmed up the crowd with a joke about the Kansas City Chiefs' recent Super Bowl victory as a way of popularizing the perceived tedious task of answering census questions.

Best said, "Now I have to be a little honest and say, when Patrick Mahomes had the microphone in front of him, and they said 'you won the Super Bowl, now what are you going to do?' I wish he would have said, 'I'm going to fill out my census!' instead of saying 'I'm going to Disney World!'"

"But," Best added, "we do want everyone to stand and be counted."

She explained her view of the importance of the census with a list of everyday examples.

"If you would like to have your potholes filled, fill out your census," Best said.

"If you would like to have good hospitals that you can go to, fill out your census.

"If you would like to have good schools for your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews to attend, fill out your census.

"If you would like to have a restaurant or some type of business come to your community, fill out your census."

Best said that Missouri hopes to achieve a "self-response" rate of 74 percent this year, referring to the portion of people who answer the form on their own without extra reminders from census workers. Last time, Missouri scored 72 percent.

Counting the under-counted

Heather Hardinger, a Taney County Partnership official also working on the Complete Count Committee, noted that in Missouri, "we have a big job to do."

Hardinger said the "many different groups" that were under-counted during the last census included Missouri's people of color, children, college students and younger people in general.

Young, the local census office manager, said the biggest barrier to getting people to fill out census forms is "a sense of privacy and a sense that they're revealing something that would be used against them in the future."

Census officials have an answer for those concerns, Young said. "We reassure everyone that their information, by law, is required to be kept strictly protected and confidential, and we can't disclose that to anyone," he said.

"And that means now, 10 years from now, 70 years from now, census information is protected," Young said.

Shikles, Gov. Parson's census point person, agreed and said Tuesday that distrust of the government is a factor they're working to overcome.

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"Rural people tend to be hard to count in the census," he said. "And that’s because they tend to be socially and geographically isolated. Often people live in rural areas to be away from government, and they view the census as government coming and locating them, trying to find them."

But Shikles saluted the nonprofit community's efforts to bring the census to rural Missouri people, including funding made available by entities in St. Louis and Kansas City to support the rural census.

"We've seen an unprecedented wave of engagement from our partners on the ground," Shikles said. "There's really a lot of energy around the census in 2020 that did not exist in 2010 or 2000."

Courtney Pinkham, 2020 Census Complete Count coordinator for southwest Missouri, noted that the region had more funding for census promotion last round than this time.

She said she's working with city and county governments over 10 of the southern Missouri counties to get the word out, along with chambers of commerce, and "every not-for-profit you can think of." One example is the Dream Center in Springfield's Woodland Heights neighborhood.

She acknowledged that Gov. Parson's Complete Count Committee skewed a bit rural in its makeup, with just one Springfield nonprofit official listed.

"We have a lot of people in Springfield, so we don't need a lot of representation on the statewide committee," she said. But that's not necessarily the case in rural counties, she said.

For example, she said, counting the Amish communities of Webster County is part of the constitutional requirement, too.

Officials said that for each person who goes uncounted, Missouri loses $1,300 of federal funding.

Census jobs still available

They also noted that the census is still recruiting temporary staff for this year's count, with jobs that pay from $18.50 to $23.50 per hour.

A sign on the wall of the Commerce Department office proudly advertised the applicant website: 2020census.gov/jobs.

Gregory Holman is a reporter for the News-Leader. Email news tips to gholman@gannett.com and consider supporting vital local journalism by subscribing. Learn more by visiting News-Leader.com/subscribe.