D.C. officials hope to secure billions of dollars in federal funding by improving the traditionally poor response rate of District residents to the U.S. Census, according to The Washington Post.

In the 2000 census, 60 percent of the D.C. population responded to a mailing from the U.S. Census Bureau. The figure was lower than the national average of 67 percent and the response rates of the District’s neighboring states – Maryland had a rate of 69 percent and Virginia had a rate of 72 percent.

On Oct. 29, Mayor Adrian Fenty announced the formation of the D.C. Counts Campaign, a citywide initiative designed to insure a high response rate to the census. Questionnaires wil be mailed to residents in March 2010.

“The 2010 Census will touch so many aspects of the public over the next decade with the largest impacts on medical assistance and insurance, transportation funding, employment assistance, Section 8 housing and education funding,” Fenty said in a press release. “It is critically important for [D.C.] to have as complete and accurate a count as possible so that we can secure our share of the federal funding in order to provide the vital public services that our residents so greatly deserve.”

The past low response rates in D.C. have been linked to a large cross-section of the population who are difficult to count, Fenty said, including immigrants, college students, the homeless, singles and the poor.

According to D.C. Planning Director Harriet Tregoning, each uncounted D.C. resident could cut over $3,500 per year out of the total federal aid the city receives: $2.5 billion out of the total $430 billion in federal funds distributed to local and state governments each year is slated to be allocated to D.C., based on calculations by The Washington Post from data provided by the Census Bureau.

Fenty’s administration estimated the city’s current population at 592,000, a slight increase from the Census Bureau’s 2008 estimate of 591,833.

Census Bureau population estimates conducted between the official census counts every ten years have led to some discrepancies. In 2005, the city succeeded in challenging the Bureau’s estimate of its population, leading to a recognized increase of the District’s population by 31,500, which resulting in more than $100 million in additional federal funds in 2005.”