Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 12, 1990 TAG: 9004120581
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Congressional researchers estimated that in the end, as few as 60 percent of the forms may be returned to the Census Bureau.
The bureau's director, Barbara Everitt Bryant, who notified Congress Wednesday of the sluggish rate of return, said in an interview that 55 percent of the forms had been returned and that the final return rate would be "solidly in the mid-60s."
Even that figure is below the bureau's original goal of a 70 percent return rate. A decline of each percentage point in the return rate means that 950,000 additional households must be visited in person by enumerators.
Census officials have argued for months that they would make up for those who did not mail back the forms by dispatching census-takers to track them down, starting April 26.
The officials brushed aside any speculation that so many people now needed to be counted by census-takers going door to door that the job was impossible.
But the congressman closest to the issue said that he had discussed with Bryant the urgent need to reinforce the bureau's efforts.
The representative, Thomas C. Sawyer, D-Ohio, who heads the House subcommittee that oversees the census, said additional census-takers would have to be hired at an additional cost of $50 million to $150 million.
The budget provides for about 300,000 enumerators, a figure that would have to be increased by 25,000 to 75,000 to compensate for the lag in the mail returns, congressional auditors said.
"I am distressed - that's not too strong a word," said Sawyer, the chairman of the Census and Population subcommittee of the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service.
"It's fair to suggest that the integrity of the census could be in jeopardy if Congress doesn't work in concert with the bureau."
The low return rate of census forms came to light as the Census Bureau has been beset with criticism and as reports abound about people who never received forms and who could not get through to the bureau's toll-free information number - 800/999-1990 - or who received no help when they did get through.
In some cases, entire neighborhoods or apartment buildings have received no forms. On occasion, even whole towns, like Ross, Calif., have received none.
Census officials said that some of the overall problem lay with the Postal Service not delivering some forms and with independent contractors mislabeling others.
But the officials, as well as independent monitors, said a big part of the problem, and a potentially more difficult one to grapple with, is that people are simply not mailing in their census forms.
Response rates as of Wednesday were as low as 34 percent in central Brooklyn, 43 percent on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 41 percent in Boston's high-rent Beacon Hill neighborhood and 49 percent in Hollywood.
Regional and local Census Bureau officials said that low rates of return cut across the socio-economic lines. That surprised them because they had thought well-to-do neighborhoods would mail back their forms at higher rates than residents of poor or working-class neighborhoods.
"The thing that would help us most is if everyone who hasn't returned a questionnaire got them in fast," Bryant said.
It is not clear why Americans are not returning the forms. Although regional census officials believe the return rate to be lower than a decade ago and believe the census to be more troubled than earlier efforts, they cannot cite figures.
The bureau says it did not keep figures for midway points in past census counts, only for final tallies.
The final count of forms that have been mailed back will begin in about 10 days, and not until it is complete will the bureau be able to match this year's performance with that of previous decades.
Officials of both the Census Bureau and Congress held out hope that more forms than currently expected would come in.
But in 1988, during a dry-run test of the census in St. Louis, about 88 percent of all the forms eventually returned had been returned at the same stage of the census process, said William Hunt, a congressional auditor.
Bryant said an off-year test was a bad comparison because there is far less publicity about the census in an off year and no sense of what she called "a national event."
Some officials privately raised the possibility that, if it becomes increasingly difficult to get census returns, the bureau may have to push back its constitutionally mandated Dec. 31 deadline for providing national totals.
The total count is scheduled to go to President Bush on that day, while the state-by-state counts used for reapportionment are scheduled be out by April 1, 1991.
Both Sawyer and Hunt expressed concern about whether enough census-takers could be recruited, particularly in some of the white-collar areas like Boston's Beacon Hill and Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"The under-return seems to be occurring in the same areas where they are experiencing recruitment problems," Sawyer said.
by CNB