If you haven't filled out your California 2020 census form, there's still time if you do it right now.
That was the message Thursday afternoon from Ditas Katague, Director of California Complete Count Census 2020.
"Don't wait!" Katague said. "Do it before dinner! If you don't do it tonight you will be invisible for the next 10 years."
The original census deadline was extended last spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now October 15 has replaced the previous census deadline of October 31 as the result of complicated legal wrangling involving the Trump administration and various courts. The exact deadline is supposedly midnight tonight but remains murky, with different applications reporting different drop-dead times ranging from 7 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Hence Katague's admonition to just get it done as soon as possible.
Filling out the form is easy. Go to my2020census.gov and answer a handful of questions about your name, date of birth, address, relationship to anyone else in your home, ethnicity and background.
"We joke around that you probably add more in a BuzzFeed quiz to figure out your Harry Potter house than you do in this [census] form," said Asst. Deputy Director of External Affairs and Media Relations Diana Crofts-Pelayo.
Filling out the form only takes a moment but the impact can be big. Each person named on the form can bring in as much as $1,000 a year in federal funding as the result of the census count. So a household of two people failing to fill out the form could cost their city as much as $20,000 in funding between now and the next census in 10 years, Crofts-Pelayo said.
The city of Ridgecrest has already responded at a greater rate than in 2010, according to Crofts-Pelayo.
"Ridgecrest has done a really good job. You guys kicked butt compared to 2010," she said.
By the numbers, 71.3 percent of Ridgecrest households self-reported to the census in 2020 as compared to 70.4 percent in 2010.
This also places Ridgecrest almost two percentage points over the response in California as a whole as of Thursday afternoon, Crofts-Pelayo said.
Ridgecrest also scores as one out of 335 of the 482 total cities in California that met or exceeded their response from 10 years ago.
As of Thursday afternoon, over 10 1/2 million households in California had already responded to the census, including some 2.4 million from the harder-to-count communities. 1.2 million more households responded in 2020 than 2010. In addition 1.9 million more responded than in 2000.
The self-response rate was 69.4 percent as of October 12, and 44 out of 58 counties had met or exceed their self-response rate from 2010 as of October 8.
Still both Katague and Crofts-Pelayo urge everyone who hasn't responded yet to do so. Census data impacts a myriad of services, including everything from emergency response plans to funding for public schools.
California is focusing on self-response as the most effective way of obtaining accurate data.
The constitutional responsibility of the state is to staff up and implement a complete and accurate count. Once that is done it's the job of the U.S. Census Bureau to get everyone counted.
"This is one of the most complex operations that the government undertakes other than war," Katague said. She added that all census data is fully confidential and constitutionally protected.
It's difficult to say whether pushing the deadline forward by two weeks will have a significant impact on services for the next ten years, but some people are wondering.
There are plenty of questions on how accurate the data will be given the shortening of the time period, Katague said.
"Accurate census data impacts re-apportionment, congressional seats" and the drawing of district lines, she said. It is also used in everything from planning emergency wildfire evacuations to hospital bed allocations and classroom sizes.
"If the data is incorrect we are basing a lot of our future planning on incorrect data," Katague said.
Both again encouraged any stragglers on Thursday afternoon to hurry up and complete the form.
"Your time is up and your community is going to suffer if you don't get counted," Katague said.
The census can be completed online at my2020census.gov
Note: This story was edited to refine word choice in one place.
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