According to the Census Bureau, the Supplemental measure ”is intended to better reflect contemporary social and economic realities and government policy effects and thus provide a further understanding of economic conditions and trends.” The official poverty measure estimates poverty rates by looking at a family’s or an individual’s cash income.

A Pew Hispanic Center report released Tuesday indicates that, “compared with the official measure, SPM figures released by the Census Bureau show a higher national poverty rate for 2010, 16 percent, compared with the official poverty rate of 15.2 percent.”

A Census Bureau report (PDF) shows that the official poverty measures in use since the 1960s:

• [do] not reflect the effects of key government policies that alter the disposable income available to families and, hence, their poverty status
• do not adjust for rising levels and standards of living that have occurred since 1965
• [do] not take into account variation in expenses that are necessary to hold a job and to earn income — expenses that reduce disposable income like transportation costs for getting to work, the increasing costs of child care for working families resulting from increased labor force participation of mothers
• [do] not take into account variation in medical costs across population groups depending on differences in health status and insurance coverage and does not account for rising health care costs as a share of family budgets
• use family size adjustments that do not take into account important changes in family situations, including payments made for child support and increasing cohabitation among unmarried couples
• do not adjust for geographic differences in prices across the nation, although there are significant variations in prices across geographic areas

According to the Hispanic Center, the alternative measure includes “medical expenses, tax credits, non-cash government benefits (such as food stamps, housing subsidies and school lunch programs) and cost-of-living adjustments for different geographic areas.”

The Pew Hispanic report adds that, “among the nation’s largest racial and ethnic groups, poverty rates using the alternative measure are higher than official poverty rates for Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites and Asians, but are lower for blacks.”

According to the report issued by the Pew Hispanic Center, using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, the poverty rate in 2010 for various groups was:

• Hispanics: 28.2 percent, higher than the official poverty rate of almost 27 percent
• Whites: 11 percent, higher than the official poverty rate of 10 percent
• Asians: almost 17 precent, higher than the official poverty rate of 12.1 percent
• Blacks: 25.4 percent, lower than the official poverty rate of 27.5 percent

The event was part of the important groundwork the Census Bureau is orchestrating in order to collect the most accurate numbers possible. The actual Census work will begin in four short months. The Census is essentially a flier, a single sheet of paper with eight questions, said event speaker Deidra Garcia, President of DRG Construction Group. On the day it comes, fill it out and be done with it. Do it for your community!

Denver Councilman Paul Lopez, who is also one of the co-chairs of Denver’s Complete Count Committee, told the audience that it’s important that all residents are counted. He said it’s particularly important for members of the country’s “hard to reach” communities. The census, he said, provides the information on which all kinds of funds are allotted– federal funding for services to Denver Metro-area schools, hospitals, child care facilities and so on. The Census is not only important but also confidential.

“Not even the president of the United States can look at Census information,” Lopez said.

Garcia said the Census was designed to be easy to complete. Garcia explained that her own father had never filled out a census because he was under the impression that “the census was just to count those who were here illegally.” He didn’t think he needed to be counted because he was an American citizen whose family had been citizens for generations.

Misunderstandings about the Census come in all varieties, said Garcia. It’s just not that complicated.

Westminster Mayor Nancy McNally said she spoke about the Census at a Laos/Mong conference last week. This message needs to reach everyone, she said. At the conference, she said, she heard translators putting her words out to a broad community that needed to be more widely recognized as part of U.S. national culture.

As she watched signs about the census go up in the ten different languages at the conference, she said she “felt a finger poking my shoulder and a woman said thank you.”

Representatives attended from the offices of U.S. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter.

“We’re here to make certain we have the correct information to help our constituents,” Perlmutter staffer Jeffery O’Neil told The Colorado Independent.

Tony Hernandez, director of the Division of Local Government and chair of the State of Colorado Complete Count Committee noted that while it is important for those involved to press the message with local communities, it was up to the public on an individual level to tell neighbors they needed to participate. It will affect all of our lives, he said. More than $2 billions at stake for Colorado alone.

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