2010 census workers will start hitting the streets on Monday. The survey of America’s population is conducted every 10 years. It helps to determine how many representatives each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives. And it is used to determine how more than $400 billion in federal funding is spent on infrastructure, such as schools, bridges and tunnels, emergency services, and hospitals, the Census Bureau says.

A new audit finds that the Census Bureau wasted millions of dollars in preparation for its 2010 U.S. population count, including thousands of temporary employees who picked up $300 checks without performing work and others who overbilled for travel costs.

Hours after a Republican-led subcommittee shot down a bipartisan redistricting proposal yesterday, the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee unanimously approved a similar measure. The bills would create bipartisan panels to redraw legislative and congressional districts in 2011, a year after the census. “This is our last chance,“ said state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, who has been proposing such legislation for seven years. “If we don’t get it done now, we will have to go another 10 years” without such a measure.

Though the U.S. Census Bureau hasn’t yet received any word of scams involving the upcoming census, scams do occur. B.J. Welborn, a Census Bureau spokeswoman at the Charlotte Regional Census Center, said there are some things people can watch for when someone comes to their door during the census season. Official census workers will have a badge with the words “U.S. Department of Commerce” and “U.S. Census Bureau” on it as well as the name of the census taker, Welborn said.

Her world has grown smaller as age finally seems to be catching up with Willie Alcorn Wells. She doesn’t get out much anymore, she has had to give up her weekly appointment with a hairdresser and she spends much of her days relaxing in a recliner in her bedroom. Several days a week, she even has what her caregiver calls “pajama days.“

The recession is profoundly disrupting American life: More people are delaying marriage and homebuying, turning to carpools yet getting stuck in ever-worse traffic, and staying put rather than moving to new cities. A broad array of U.S. census data being released today also shows a dip in the foreign-born population last year, to less than 38 million after it reached an all-time high in 2007. This was due to declines in low-skilled workers from Mexico searching for jobs in Arizona, Florida and California.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s first estimate of how many people don’t have health insurance finds the highest Virginia perecentages in the state’s college towns.

The Internet has changed the way most Virginians live, but not all of them. A new survey by the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that more than 73 percent of Virginians lived in a household with Internet access in 2007. That’s higher than the national average. Only eight other states had a higher percentage of households with Internet access in 2007.

The Rev. Antonio Marques, pastor of Iglesia Communidad Evangelica in Glen Allen, has been educating his Spanish-speaking congregation about the benefits of filling out census forms. But he also has been telling those church members who are living in the area illegally that providing census data doesn’t bring them any benefits and that it might bring consequences later.

The students in Randy Jones’ fourth-grade class received a welcome break yesterday afternoon as 2010 Census workers delivered bags of goodies. The workers’ mission: to impart the importance of next year’s census on some of the youngest to be counted. About a dozen census workers, some from Kentucky who were in Richmond on other business, converged on eastern Henrico County’s Arthur Ashe Jr. Elementary School to reach out to the students and staff members. The event was facilitated by Brenda Lee Steppe, a Virginia partnership specialist for the 2010 Census.

If there’s one thing the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t need to know, it’s your bank-account number. Nor your Social Security number. Nor any other information that could lead to identity theft. At this point in the process, in fact, the only thing census workers must verify is the address of your residence and whether there are any other dwellings on the property. That’s so surveys can be mailed to the right addresses next March.

The census count is on, and right now it’s about 3,000 short. That’s how many people the U.S. Census Bureau needs to hire in Virginia in the coming months. Those people—all temporary employees, some part-time, some full-time—will staff three offices charged with verifying addresses in Virginia. The employees will be parceled out evenly among offices in Richmond, Alexandria and Roanoke.