Census having trouble finding workers in some rural areas, especially Central Appalachia

As the U.S. Census Bureau prepares for another decennial census this spring, it is again struggling to find enough applicants for census-taking jobs in some rural areas. Applicant shortages have been reported from remote northern Michigan to Central Appalachia. The shortages could add to the potential problem of undercounting rural population.

“There are some localized areas like in Eastern Kentucky where we aren’t having the number of applicants we would like,” B. J. Wellborn, a media-relations team member for the bureau’s Charlotte region, told the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Census officials blame the shortages on factors such as poor winter weather, confusion about a census job's effect on unemployment benefits and the temporary duration of most jobs.

One factor they say isn't discouraging Kentucky applicants, at least not now, is the highly publicized death of rural census worker Bill Sparkman in Clay County, Ky., last fall. Sparkman staged his death to look like a victim of anti-government sympathy, but it wasn't ruled a suicide for two months, long after news stories had painted him as a possible victim of marijuana growers, methamphetamine makers, or haters of President Obama.

Althea Francis, head of the census office in Somerset, Ky., said it had trouble recruiting after Sparkman’s death, but most of those problems had been erased by the suicide ruling. Nevertheless, every county in her 24-county region of southeastern Kentucky remains short of applicants. (Read more)