State Could Lose $683 Million in Census Undercount

California will lose an estimated $683 million over the next 10 years--enough money to build two new state university campuses or double the fight against AIDS--if a projected U.S. census undercount is not averted here, according to a state Senate subcommittee that met in Los Angeles on Monday.

Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) said the Census Bureau estimates that 4.6% of all Los Angeles residents were missed by the 1980 census--a figure four times the national average--and that it “would be disastrous” if the undercount was repeated, as feared, in 1990.

But Leo Estrada, a professor of urban studies at UCLA, said weaknesses in census-taking methods make it extremely difficult to count the homeless, people in transition between permanent residences and families doubling up with others or living in illegal housing--groups that represent a significant part of Los Angeles’ booming population.

Several officials who spoke before Torres’ subcommittee on minorities, women and the 1990 reapportionment said Los Angeles could be the hardest hit city in America, with tens of millions of dollars in federal aid withheld from housing, education, highways, youth jobs and other programs critical to the region.

One of the most crucial problems, several officials said, is the fear and confusion among many California residents, including illegal aliens who refuse to cooperate for fear of being deported, or the poor and illiterate who do not hear about the census.

Several groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, are visiting talk shows and producing videotapes and brochures to get the word out to Latinos and other chronically undercounted groups in MALDEF’s Make Yourself Count program. In addition, the Los Angeles City Council has set aside $600,000 and other agencies have joined in, creating a $1-million local outreach budget.

Despite such plans, many groups were doubtful Monday that enough is being done. Census officials were urged to change their outreach and counting methods to take into account special populations that are dramatically undercounted, such as “nigritics”--a term used by some Caribbean and Latin American blacks whose ancestral backgrounds differ from American blacks, and for whom there is no separate demographic category.

Blacks of all kinds are badly undercounted, with nearly 9% of those residing in Los Angeles left out of the final totals, according to the subcommittee’s staff.

Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, said inaccurate counts of blacks have translated into lost political representation and underfunded hospitals, schools and public transportation.

Others said illegal alien Filipinos are severely undercounted in Los Angeles, as well as Asian immigrants who have difficulty understanding the census forms, which are printed only in English and Spanish.

A spokesman for the Asian Pacific Legal Center said, for instance, that the 1980 census counted 28,000 Indochinese in the Los Angeles area, “when 50,000 of them were on the welfare rolls alone.” He said that under the new outreach programs, only five census specialists have been assigned to help count Asians here. “These five census workers speak only four of the (30) Asian languages here,” the spokesman said.

Jessica Heinz, a deputy city attorney, said the city is pinning much hope on a sample count of 150,000 residences nationwide, to be undertaken after the census is completed. The sample count is designed to estimate the number of people who were missed, and correct for it in the official census by mid-1991.

If the 1990 undercount is corrected, Heinz said, California will “get one, possibly two new seats in the House of Representatives,” and Los Angeles alone will receive tens of millions of dollars in additional federal aid.

John Reeder, regional director of the U.S. census, told the panel that his office has hired 33 minority outreach workers and will distribute pamphlets in 30 different languages to assist immigrants. A toll-free hot line number is also being created.