Glitches Slow Census Takers Searching for the Homeless : Poverty: A lack of translators and Spanish-language forms hurts their efforts. An angry county supervisor helps them count heads.

At Wednesday’s first light, weary teams of census takers plunged into the thicket of Ventura’s Hobo Jungle, searching for the hard-core homeless who live in makeshift quarters along the dry bed of the Ventura River.

It was the final step in a balky and often awkward effort to tally the county’s homeless as part of the 1990 U.S. Census. The sweep had begun nearly 12 hours earlier when census takers descended on the county’s homeless shelters.

More than once, census workers showed up without badly needed bilingual translators and Spanish-language census forms to count homeless Latinos.

On two occasions, the census effort struck county Supervisor Madge Schaefer as so badly organized that she helped count people at homeless shelters in Oxnard.

By the time the widely publicized project was over, some of the county’s homeless remained uncounted. But the census teams had managed to count others, and the long night of interviewing had touched some of the census workers personally.

“These people are really just like us,” said John Pence, after interviewing a painfully shy 60-year-old man who had built his home out of wooden pallets wedged underneath the Main Street Bridge.

“Some of us live in houses; others end up in a shack in the river bottom,” said Pence, 68, a retiree who decided to help with the homeless count.

Although the dusk-to-dawn sweep rarely went smoothly, it came off without a single violent incident, said Geary-Ellen Williams, manager of the local census office.

Some homeless advocates had worried that a pre-dawn arrival of census takers might anger some of the more antisocial people who live in the stretch of Ventura River bottom known as Hobo Jungle.

“It’s kind of freaky to see all these strangers,” said John White, 42, who has lived in the river bottom for six months. “What’s next, the SWAT team?”

At another encampment, Michael Baird, a census taker, asked two homeless men about another man who was sleeping in a nearby tent. “Can I wake him up?” Baird asked.

“I wouldn’t do that,” one of the men responded. “He’s the unsociable kind.”

As a result, many shanties and makeshift tents went unexplored. And while census takers were tromping through the homeless camp, a number of homeless people scampered up the river’s levee and into town.

“There’s no way they could find them all,” said Patrick Driskell, executive director of Project Understanding, a nonprofit group that provides food, clothing and a variety of services to the homeless in Ventura. “Some just won’t want to be counted.”

Census takers met virtually no resistance from the homeless they had met earlier at the county’s shelters. A census team was warmly greeted by many who had congregated inside the Ventura County Rescue Mission, a 50-bed home for single homeless men in Oxnard.

“Some people may be a little distrustful of the government, but I don’t think there should be any objections,” said Michael Blodgett, 40, who added that he has been homeless for five years. He suggested that the census could bring the homeless and other needy people a bigger share of federal money, especially after expected reductions in the defense budget.

“As long as they are American citizens, they should stand up and be counted,” Blodgett said.

Two dozen Latinos, huddled outside the mission, voiced no fears about cooperating with U.S. authorities. Filomone Basquez, who has been in the United States for two months, said he was not worried that the Census Bureau would breach its promise of confidentiality to turn over information to immigration authorities.

Yet when the team of census workers arrived at the mission, all but a few of those congregated outside slipped into the night.

The most embarrassing problems came inside the Ventura County Mission. Latino men comprised the vast majority of those waiting for a hot meal and a bed. Few spoke English.

Not one of the census team’s three members could speak Spanish. The two elderly white men and one elderly white woman arrived without an interpreter and short of Spanish-language census forms.

As the mission’s pastor led the congregation in hymns, census workers threaded through the pews, asking if anyone spoke English. Time after time, they were waved away by a wagging finger.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Schaefer, who had donned a white Census Bureau smock to supervise the count. “They were supposed to call for a translator.”

It was too much for Schaefer. For months, she has promoted a full census count as crucial for the county to receive its fair share of federal dollars, which are distributed by population.

Between hymns, she nudged a bilingual mission employee to make an announcement in Spanish about the census. Then she scolded a Census Bureau supervisor, who was accompanying her, until he agreed to telephone for more Spanish-language forms.

At the county’s Armory in Oxnard, another census team arrived without Spanish-speaking or bilingual workers. The Armory was reopened Tuesday night by a special order of the governor in an effort to attract homeless people to a central location for easy counting.

Seventy-eight homeless people showed up for a free chili dinner and a canvas cot; however, census workers had collected only 28 of the 78 listed on the shelter’s roster as many began to settle into bed.

Worried that they might not be counted, Schaefer demanded that bureau officials call in a translator. Within a few minutes, two bilingual census employees appeared, making announcements and passing out Spanish-language forms.

Schaefer picked up some forms and began to assist Latino men in filling them out. “I filled out seven forms in five minutes,” she said. “And they didn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Spanish.”

Schaefer said she was told that if any homeless people in the shelters were not counted by midnight, they would not be counted at all.

But Randy Metcalf, a regional census supervisor accompanying Schaefer, later said she was misinformed. He said that if any of the homeless in the shelter were not interviewed, their numbers would be picked up from the shelter’s roster.

“Everything is going very smoothly,” Metcalf assured reporters during the all-night sweep. “We’ve had no problems.”

Steve Alnwick, a Los Angeles-based Census Bureau researcher who wanted to unofficially witness the homeless count firsthand, appeared exasperated at the never-ending glitches.

“This is controlled chaos,” he said, rolling his eyes.

On Wednesday afternoon, with the long night’s work behind them, census officials conceded that there had been some problems in finding Spanish translators for the head count but proclaimed that the project had been successful overall.

Williams, the manager for the Ventura County district office of the Census Bureau, said that only seven of the 59 census takers who showed up to count the homeless spoke Spanish.

She said the district office and the city of Oxnard had sponsored Spanish language ads on local radio and television stations, but failed to attract enough Spanish speakers.

“We thought we’d have enough people who spoke Spanish, but we didn’t realize there were that many homeless people who don’t speak English,” Williams said.

Williams said she sent out four translators when Schaefer called during the count Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. One was a receptionist and the others were managers and supervisors, she said.

But Williams denied that the lack of Spanish speakers affected the accuracy of the count.

“I think it went really well,” she said.

Times staff writer Tracey Kaplan contributed to this story.