Bradley, Dinkens Urge Revision of ‘Flawed’ Census

In an unusual joint statement, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and New York Mayor David Dinkens declared Wednesday that the 1990 Census will fail to count large numbers of immigrants, minorities and other urban poor unless federal officials agree to use a controversial sampling technique to adjust the final tally.

“The census is seriously and deeply flawed,” the mayors’ statement read. “We stand on the verge of an undercount of historic and disastrous proportions.”

The joint statement, issued during a conference of the American Statistical Assn., adds fuel to an already partisan debate over the quality of the census and what should be done to make it more accurate.

The debate pits big city Democrats against congressional Republicans. Urban Democrats are concerned about the potential loss of federal aid and political representation if city populations are undercounted. Republicans in the House of Representatives, already in a minority, don’t want the Democrats to score further gains--a possibility if the 1991 congressional reapportionment adds new seats based on growing urban populations.

“What we are struggling with today is who is going to control the Congress of the United States and, in particular, the House of Representatives, in the decade of the 1990s,” said Rep. William Dannemeyer, a Fullerton Republican who spoke Wednesday during a hearing in Anaheim examining the progress of the census.

The hearing was conducted by Ohio Democratic Rep. Thomas Sawyer, who chairs a subcommittee on census and population. During the hearing, one of several events scheduled as part of a conference of the American Statistical Assn., experts delivered contrasting testimony on the success of the 1990 census to date.

Although they did not appear at the conference, Bradley and Dinkens used the event to take issue with the director of the Census Bureau and other federal officials who contend that the 1990 census will be more accurate than the 1980 census.

“We remain confident that this census will be the best ever achieved,” said Michael R. Darby, under secretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the agency in charge of the census.

Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher will decide by July 15, 1991, whether to use the sampling technique favored by Bradley and Dinkens to adjust the census. Mosbacher is being advised by a panel of eight technical experts who are divided over the issue of adjustment.

Work on the census adjustment, known as the “post-enumeration survey,” is well under way. In a follow-up to the April census, a sample of 300,000 people, representing the entire U.S. population, are being reinterviewed.

Mosbacher must decide whether the information gained from the post-enumeration sample is more reliable than the initial census data--and whether it should be used to make assumptions about the entire population.

One of those assumptions might well be that there are more inner-city residents than were found in the mailed census survey or in a house-to-house survey conducted earlier this year.

Bradley and Dinkens argue that the low overall mail-back rate--12% lower than 1980--is a good indication that the census will not be accurate. They contend that the house-to-house enumeration was a faulty follow-up procedure because census takers often obtained information about households from neighbors or other second-hand sources.