Ten years ago, somewhere in Oxford County near the town of Fryeburg, a Maine resident was living in an unorganized township with no clear roads to his domicile. We know the resident was there, U.S. Census employee David Slagger said Saturday, because that person responded to a questionnaire sent out in the last census.
The resident will be counted again as the 2010 Census gets under way this month. To do that, a census worker will have to take a 16-mile snowmobile or all-terrain vehicle ride into the woods and then snowshoe or hike another mile to find the resident.
That’s why Slagger manned a booth at this weekend’s 72nd annual Eastern Maine Sportsmen’s Show. The U.S. Census is looking to hire people who feel comfortable riding ATVs or snowmobiles to get to residents who live far from Maine’s towns and cities.
Everyone must be counted, Slagger said — even if the count takes a worker 17 miles into the woods of Oxford County.
“Here in Maine, our effort is to get at those places where we know you’re not going to be able to get in your car and drive there,” said Slagger, a U.S. Census partnership specialist in the Bangor office who works with what he described as hard-to-count populations, which traditionally have included native groups and college students. “So we figured, people that come to the Sportsmen’s Show might have ATVs or four-wheel drive [vehicles] and could possibly be interested in working for the Census Bureau.”
You can read more in an article by Jessica Bloch in the Bangor Daily News at http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/138908.html.
