About the Mobile Chamber
The Mobile Chamber is a private business organization with more than 1,700 members and the economic developer for the City of Mobile and Mobile County. The Mobile Chamber’s focus is to provide members with networking, marketing and professional development opportunities, expand jobs in the area, develop the local workforce, advocate legislative priorities and offer resources to help small businesses grow. Additional information is on the Chamber’s website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
Census Critical to Alabama’s Future
The Business View – November 2019 / From the Publisher
Bill Sisson, President & CEO , Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce
Every 10 years the census bureau gathers information on the population of the United States to determine how many representatives each state will get in Congress and how tax dollars will be distributed. The 2020 census is underway, and it’s critical to Alabama and here locally on the Gulf Coast that there is an accurate account of every person living in the area, including the homeless.
Participation is key to an accurate count, and estimates show unless Alabama is successful at increasing its participation rate in the 2020 count, we could lose one or even two representatives in Congress. Furthermore, there are more than 55 federal programs which rely on census data to gauge how to allocate federal funds to state and local governments. These funds are used to pay for critical public funding such as healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure such as roads and bridges.
As business leaders, we should be doubly concerned that every citizen is counted. Census data is continually used for economic development projects, providing a detailed demographic picture of workforce and future potential customers, and is used by new businesses to determine where to open new locations.
Let’s work together to get the word out by sharing information about the upcoming census, being personally committed to completing the census forms for our own families, and by encouraging our employees, business associates, and neighbors to do the same. Read more in the article on page 5.
Click here to read The Business View – November 2019
To read more about the Chamber’s Economic Development efforts, click here.
Additional information is on the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce’s website at www.mobilechamber.com, on Facebook at @MobileChamber and Twitter at @MobileChamber.