ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 21, 1996 TAG: 9603210036
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
note: below
Cities with large minority populations suffered a sharp defeat Wednesday when the Supreme Court unanimously rejected their pleas that the 1990 census be adjusted to make up for an admitted undercounting.
The adjustment, the cities said, would bring hundreds of millions of dollars a year in additional federal money and greater representation in state legislatures to minority areas.
The justices rejected the cities' claims that the inaccurate count of 248,709,873 people in 1990 violated the democratic principle of equal representation and discriminated against minorities.
There has never been an error-free census and the government made an ``extraordinary effort'' to count minorities in 1990, the court said. The ruling said that then-Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher acted within his authority by rejecting the request for an adjustment.
Among the winners were Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Indiana and Ohio, which feared losses of federal money if the census was changed. In addition, Wisconsin would have lost a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to California.
The count was challenged by cities and counties including Philadelphia; San Jose, Calif.; New York City; Los Angeles; Boston; Dade County and Broward County, Fla.; Long Beach, Calif.; Cleveland and Chicago.
Census figures are used to determine how congressional and state election districts are drawn and how federal money is distributed for health, highway, social services, community development and other programs.
The Census Bureau's demographic data indicated that despite special efforts to reduce the error rate it had undercounted blacks, Hispanics and American Indians by about 5 percent and missed more than 3 percent of Asians.
The bureau's director, Barbara Bryant, recommended an upward adjustment that would have raised the official population by about five million to 254 million. Mosbacher overrode the bureau.
All nine Supreme Court justices found the decision, which the Clinton administration defended, ``entirely reasonable.''
Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted the Census Bureau director acknowledged ``adjustment is an issue about which reasonable men and women and the best statisticians and demographers can disagree.''
The government's major argument against a revision was: While a statistical adjustment would make the total population figure more accurate, it wouldn't improve the accuracy of data showing the proportions of people living in different areas.
Since the constitutional purpose of the census is to determine how to divide seats in the House of Representatives among the states, it made sense to give priority to the accuracy of proportionate data, Rehnquist said.
Theodore Shaw, associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which joined in the suit, said, ``The undercounting has a real impact on real people in terms of the resources that are available to them.'' Detroit, for example, claimed 40,000 people were not counted. Former Mayor Coleman Young calculated the resulting financial loss at upwards of $66 million over the decade.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB