The U.S. Census Bureau has leased about 6,000 square feet of office space in Wilmington in the old PPD building across from Cameron Art Museum. The address is 3147 South 17th St., Suite 101, but the building faces Independence Boulevard.  The office will open this fall.

The building just came available in July after a several year lease with PPD expired according to Hill Rogers, broker in charge at Cameron Management. There are still 54,539 square feet of space available in the building according to Costar, a company that tracks available office space. The other building on the site, another former PPD building, is fully leased to New Hanover Regional Medical Center, Rogers said.
 
The Wilmington office will support 2010 Census operations for the counties of Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, New Hanover, Pender and Robeson and will employ about 1,100 office and field workers in the area.  Those interested in census jobs will be able to apply in late fall 2009.  Job openings, when available, will be posted at www.census.gov.
 
The Wilmington office is one of 10 new local census offices set to open in 2009 across North Carolina. Five offices opened in 2008 to carry out operations to prepare for the census. They are located in Asheville, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greensboro and Greenville.

Census counts are used to determine the number of congressional seats for each state, the shape of legislative and local government districts, and how more than $400 billion in federal funds is distributed annually to communities across the country.

April 1, 2010, is Census Day, the reference day for collecting census information from every household in America. Census questionnaires will be mailed or delivered in mid-March. The Wilmington office will close after census operations end in 2010.