Pasadena’s Hopes for Accurate Tally Rest With PHREADD

In the Pasadena City Hall basement sits “PHREADD,” as city workers have nicknamed the 4-foot-tall, 9-foot-long mini-frame computer.

For the past year, PHREADD has been busy spitting out Pasadena addresses, nearly 20,000 of them. With relentless computer logic, PHREADD rejects addresses that contain misspelled street names, that lack a north or south designation or that conflict with county assessor records.

PHREADD has sent city workers into the streets to discover apartments where vacant lots were supposed to be and stores where homes once stood.

The painstaking work is half of Pasadena’s $95,000 effort for an accurate population count under the 1990 U.S. Census.

Backed up by PHREADD’s logic and the footwork of 20 temporary city employees, Pasadena was one of the 90 cities in Southern California to successfully challenge U.S. Census figures and obtain a recount of housing units in the city.

Meanwhile, another group of city employees and volunteers spent months producing 31,000 flyers in English, Spanish and Armenian; three cable television shows; 77,000 utility bill inserts, and two video announcements featuring actor Edward James Olmos, one in English and the other in Spanish.

Most of the work of the city’s count committee focused on making April 1 the deadline for Pasadena residents to fill in their census forms and drop them in the mail, said Bess Hoeferkamp, a committee member. Although the forms, which were mailed out by the Census Bureau recently, can be returned as late as June, the committee has emphasized sending in the forms early, Hoeferkamp said.

The committee is winding down its efforts, sending one last reminder in the city’s utility bills and a special mailing to residents of northwest Pasadena.

“In comparison with other areas, we’re in pretty good shape,” said City Director Bill Paparian, head of the Mayor’s Complete Count Committee.

Pasadena’s efforts contrast with those in other San Gabriel Valley cities, many of which did little, or which promoted the census late in the process, Paparian said.

But officials in Pasadena, where minorities make up 53.7% of the 130,000 population, decided early that an accurate count was essential, especially because, according to some estimates, minorities were undercounted by at least 11% nationwide in the 1980 census.

“Basically, the census boils down to money and votes,” said Steve Almwick, a geographer with the regional census office in Van Nuys. Each person counted brings the city from $100 to $300 annually in federal and state revenue, Almwick said.

In addition, political boundaries are dependent on the population counts. So is planning for schools, hospitals and a number of social service programs, Almwick said.

Despite the importance of the census, Pasadena in 1980 did little in the way of ensuring that the federal count was accurate, said Pat Bond, 1980 director of the Pasadena census office. City officials relied then on mailing lists generated by the Census Bureau, whose accuracy is oftentimes suspect, Bond said.

The Census Bureau compiles its mailing lists by buying lists from mail-order firms and sending cards to U.S. Postal carriers, who verify that the addresses exist, Bond said. Not satisfied with this methodology, Pasadena last year decided to spend $50,000 to secure county tax assessor rolls and hire temporary workers to compare the rolls against the city Building Department’s structure lists and against the census tracts provided by the U.S. Census.

That’s where PHREADD came in.

PHREADD--pronounced FRED--is not an acronym, city employee Pat Leonard said. She put the computer to work last April, checking city addresses block by block and gearing up for a challenge of the data from the Census Bureau, which originally tallied 65,269 housing units in Pasadena.

“The 65,000 figure was actually meaningless,” Leonard said. “It included entire tracts on the Pasadena border that had only one or two blocks in Pasadena.”

The Census Bureau’s initial figures are rough estimates and are usually pared down drastically after the actual count. Because of that, it is to the city’s advantage to do its own block-by-block count to make sure that it is not shortchanged, Leonard said.

In this case, the city’s own estimate was 55,000 housing units. Leonard and PHREADD set to work, racing to meet a Jan. 5 deadline to challenge the census figures. Even with an extension to Jan. 18, Leonard barely made the deadline. The city completed its stack of addresses at 4:15 p.m. that day, and Leonard jumped in her car and raced on the Foothill Freeway toward the Van Nuys census office.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it, but I went screaming in there and beat on the door,” Leonard said. “I made some poor guy who had just come out for a smoke let me in.”

The effort paid off. Pasadena challenged 229 blocks, saying the U.S. Census was off by 6,000 housing units and the Census Bureau recounted 407 blocks.

PHREADD’s work continues as the city refines its list to prepare for another challenge in August when the census devises its own final list, Leonard said. At this point, she does not know how many housing units exist in Pasadena.

In all, the information effort by the mayor’s committee has involved 10 temporary staff members and 45 community volunteers representing senior citizens, Armenians, blacks and Latinos, Hoeferkamp said.

Pasadena is one of 2,000 cities nationwide that have engaged in such intensive promotion, she said.

“There’s no comparison to the 1980 effort,” Bond said. “The city really did a wonderful job.”