Census Chief Sharply Rebuts Challenge From Cities : Population: Early housing unit counts ‘were largely accurate,’ and local officials made far worse mistakes than the bureau did, she tells a House subcommittee.

Census Bureau officials warned Los Angeles and other cities Wednesday that many population count challenges are likely to be dismissed because local officials tried to pass off vacant buildings, empty lots and other uninhabited places as occupied housing units.

Delivering her sharpest rebuttal to date of charges that census enumerators undercounted many communities, Census Director Barbara Everitt Bryant told the census and population subcommittee of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee that early housing unit counts “were largely accurate.”

Bryant acknowledged that the bureau had committed some coding errors, resulting in overlooked dwellings, but she said the agency corrected those mistakes by punching updated information into a database.

Bryant said the bureau’s computers corrected mistakes made by census counters in New Jersey, who reportedly fabricated information about some hard-to-count households without actually visiting them. An investigation into the allegations resulted in census officials’ recounting 18,303 households in northern New Jersey.

Bryant said the bureau is unwilling, however, to recount some blocks flagged by city officials because they contained “large amounts of error or are out of date compared to census counts.”

Referring to bureau efforts to correct its counting errors, Rep. Thomas C. Sawyer, the Ohio Democrat who heads the subcommittee, said: “I’m grateful they made the effort but concerned they had to.”

Bryant, however, charged that local officials had made far worse mistakes in their efforts to discredit the bureau’s preliminary figures.

“There was one lively example in Queens (New York), where the city said there were 414 housing units on what turns out to be a piece of the Gateway National Recreation Area, and all we can find are three lifeguard benches,” she said.

Bryant declined to identify other cities that made such mistakes or to quantify the number of claims expected to be rejected for bogus documentation. The bureau is expected to respond to the cities’ challenges later this month.

The challenges involve preliminary census findings released in September as part of the bureau’s efforts to review the accuracy of the decennial census. Many urban mayors, state governors and congressional leaders have complained that their localities were undercounted.

In Los Angeles, city officials reported that the census missed nearly 49,000 dwellings, or almost 6% of the city’s total housing stock.

In Orange County, 16 cities and the county as a whole filed challenges, asking the Census Bureau to check its count, said Steve Alnwick, a geographic coordinator at the bureau. The cities are Anaheim, Buena Park, Costa Mesa, Cypress, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Mission Viejo, Newport Beach, Orange, San Clemente, Seal Beach, Stanton and Westminster.

Across the country, about 25% of 39,198 local governments officially responded to the bureau’s findings, including eight large cities that questioned the counts of more than 2,000 residential blocks in their jurisdictions.

Lance Simmens, assistant executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said that because city leaders did not know which challenges would be rejected by the bureau, they could not respond to Bryant’s charge that inaccurate data was used to support their challenges.

Nevertheless, Simmens used the census director’s comments as an opportunity “to reiterate our call for a statistical correction of the 1990 census.” The conference has served as an umbrella group in a series of legal battles with census officials.

Bryant said the bureau is on schedule to meet a legal requirement to deliver a final count of the nation’s population to President Bush before Dec. 31.

“I will not speculate on what those numbers will be,” she told the panel.