City official: Census matters

New Hampton Economic Development Director Tammy Robinson says the first question she is asked by a business or factory looking at her city as a possible destination is almost always the same.
How many working age people do you have?
And that’s one of the main reason Robinson last week made a push for area residents to complete their U.S. Census paperwork.
“People think the census is just counting people,” she said, “but it’s a lot more than that. It’s vitally important for us to have every single person counted. There’s funding, there’s representation, there’s grants … it’s all tied to the census.”
The decennial census has had a rocky year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the Coronavirus hit, the plan was that the “self-response” phase of the census would end July 31 and that the “nonresponse followup” would take place from May 13 to July 31.
And the U.S. Census Bureau had planned to have field offices at “peak operations” by March 1.
But a number of census offices had to be closed because of the pandemic and were reopened on a phased basis between May 4 and June 12. And both the self-response and nonresponse followup periods were extended through the end of this month.
— For more on this story, see the Sept. 1 Tribune