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"Participating in the census is one of the most powerful ways of having a voice in the United States." -- The official 2010 census website.

I, like many people who are just learning about the census, want to know more about it. It makes sense that a community's local census office would be the best place go to, I would think twice about that now.

Two weeks ago I started researching about local census offices in Liberty City and neighboring communities. It was somewhat puzzling to find out that Liberty City does not have an actual office. The city's zip codes are managed by the Miami East office located in Biscayne and 47 st. This office also deals with Miami Shore and Miami Beach. Besides the fact that the office is nowhere near the city and that in itself is an obstacle for the people of Liberty City to have an active part in the census, they also take more than a week and a half to answer a phone call.

No wait, I'm still waiting for the call back.

I called at least four times wanting "general questions about the census" answered. First, I called explaining how I am a student from FIU, that got me on a post-it with a promise of a call back from the recruiting manager. This was after speaking with two different people who were happy to transfer me along and along.

I finally called today and used the "reporter" card, and that got me on another post-it with the same promise of a call back but now it got more concise. I will be called after the office manager forwards my information and the recruiting manager gets a response via email. With not that much patience left I asked why the hassle and all the office clerk could say was, "I don't know you know this is government stuff."

"Government stuff?" Isn't this for the people and an organization that has to be as easy and accessible as possible? Tomorrow, I want to personally go. I'm honestly more interested in finding out how I will get treated than the actual information they'll say.

I know this is not a representation of all of the census offices, at the beginning of this research the office manager at the Hialeah location was more than extremely helpful. This is why it's more than frustrating the run-around I'm getting.

Why the Seclution?

Since the Census is coming up, there are various groups in the class doing stories on it. My take on it is what the Census is doing in order to get Liberty City to have a greater turnout since the last count. During research some of the things I found have been somewhat confusing.

According to Brad Brown, a volunteer for the NAACP for various years now, Liberty City only had a 10 percent turnout since the last census. He said that many people were illegal immigrants and that one of their efforts was to educate on the confidentiality of the census and the benefits of having yourself count. Liberty City had the lowest turnout from all it's neighboring communities.

Reasearch led to finding out that all the communities around Liberty City had at least one official census office where different services were offered. The offices work by covering zip codes not particular boundaries. I called different offices with scattered zip codes from the general areas of the city. I tried looking for a zip code at the heart of the city as well as the outskirts.

These were the zip codes:

33168

33127

33142

33147

33150

With the exception of the first one, which is in the borderline of two offices the rest of the codes are covered by the "Miami East" office which is located at Biscayne and 47th St. That's not even on the border line of the city! Now I ask again why the isolation?





The census talks about making it easy and accesable for people to fill out the form, why then would there only be one office to cover one whole city and on top of that it's on the edge? What about the people that don't have cars or the older generations who can't be taking two or three different buses to get there?

Confusing. An organization whose whole purpose is to count and go out and gather those whom don't want to make the effort. Why then not implement more offices or a stronger tactic or plan to get the word out?

The NAACP is doing some outreach programs through churches and groups to get in touch with the community about the importance of the census. By law the census has to be in by April 1st, that's about a month and a half away, and at this stage of the game I trully think it will have to take a whole lot more than that.

Below is a better map of the Miami East office:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=++Miami+East+NW+72nd+Street+Miami,+FL+33150&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=31.839416,56.513672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=NW+72nd+St,+Miami,+Miami-Dade,+Florida+33150&ll=25.84028,-80.20659&spn=0.008826,0.013797&z=16