By Doug Miller

An unexpectedly robust mail-in response from American households wound up saving the U.S. Census Bureau nearly a quarter of the money it had budgeted this fiscal year to conduct the 2010 Census, according to Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and other federal officials.

The bureau reported that it’s returning $1.6 billion in unused operational funds to the U.S. Treasury, in large part because “the American people stepped up,” willingly filling out population surveys and mailing them back in a timely fashion, Locke noted. A solid 72 percent of U.S. households returned questionnaires, significantly reducing follow-up costs.

That response saved the agency about $650 million of the funds that had been earmarked for labor-intensive, door-to-door interviews. Another $800 million in savings were realized from a contingency fund set aside to deal with natural disasters – floods, hurricanes, tornadoes – that didn’t happen, and an additional $150 million went unspent when separately itemized Census operations for counting heads in Alaska and on Native American lands cost less than originally had been budgeted.

Secretary Locke said that “with the cooperation of the American public and a little bit of luck, the census stayed on track with significant cost savings to taxpayers.”

In all, the unused funds represented 22 percent of the cost this fiscal year to conduct the population count, which occurs every 10 years. The resulting numbers are used to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives and equitably distribute more than $400 billion in federal aid across the states.

Before the official count actually began, it had been feared that illegal immigrants – wary of having law enforcement authorities descend on them as a result of truthfully answering questions – would skew the numbers downward and trigger costly door-to-door surveys. The high mail-in response suggests the bureau successfully avoided that worrisome pothole in the census road.

Census officials attributed that precision navigation at least in part to targeted advertising in hard-to-count sections of the country, use for the first time of bilingual census forms, and partnerships with civic groups and businesses to dampen fears and heighten awareness of the count. In his public web log, or blog, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves says the agency’s findings “show that local partners who got out the message to their neighbors… greatly increased awareness of the census from December 2009 to April 1, 2010.”

“If there are concerns about confidentiality in a group,” he continued, “they can be much more effectively addressed by a local leader saying ‘This is a safe thing to do. Go ahead. It’s good for our group, it’s good for our community.’”

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) conducted an extensive news and informational campaign during the winter and early spring – under the rubric of Count on Change 2010, — to encourage African Americans and Hispanics to participate in the census without fear of retribution. The multi-layered effort emphasized the economic and political importance of an accurate headcount to minorities and the poor, who traditionally tend to be undercounted. The 2000 Census missed about a million people of color, more than 600,000 of whom were African American. This year there were special concerns that census takers would not only miss many of the poor, the mobile, and children, but also those cut adrift from their previous addresses by the home foreclosure crisis as well as those displaced by the 2005 and 2008 Gulf Coast hurricanes.

However, despite the efforts of LDF and other organizations, some states – including California, Texas, Arizona, New York and Florida – experienced average or below-average mail-in response rates.

After ongoing quality assurance checks, the Census Bureau will report final population numbers at the end of the year.

Doug Miller is a writer living in Westchester County, New York