Be Counted

 

 

The current response rate for the once-every-ten-year U.S. Census in Fairfield stands at 68.2 percent.

That’s shameful.

The census form has been mailed to every home in the city. It has ten questions and takes maybe ten minutes to complete. The consequences of not filling out your census form might not seem terribly threatening to you. By law, every citizen is required to fill out the form…but you and I know nobody is going to get arrested for ditching their civic duty.

You can do it by phone, or on-line. There’s really no excuse.

Without an accurate count, we could suffer the loss of government aid to the tune of millions of dollars over the next decade. We already know that Illinois is going to take a hit because of the continuing exodus of people seeking jobs or lower taxes elsewhere.

In a place like Fairfield, where we have suffered some significant job loss since 2010, the numbers are probably going to track lower anyway…but when only 68-out-of-every-100 people turn in their forms, it means less of the money we sent to Springfield and Washington, D.C. comes back here.

If you haven’t fulfilled your responsibility, you still have time. If you don’t do it out of civic duty, do it for the rest of us.

Be counted.