Lynwood : Special Census Is First Step in Effort to Hire the Jobless

City officials want the federal government to give the city $10 million a year for a two-year pilot program that would put unemployed Lynwood residents to work.

The City Council recently voted to set aside $25,000 for a special census to determine the city’s unemployment rate. Armed with the census data, city officials hope to persuade federal officials to fund a program to hire out-of-work residents to do public service projects, such as graffiti cleanup, street cleaning and elderly assistance.

Mayor Robert Henning, who championed the idea, said he estimates that the unemployment rate in the city of 62,000 is at least 25%. “The recession hasn’t subsided. It’s there and it’s not going away,” he said. The solution, Henning said, is not giving the jobless extended unemployment benefits as Congress wants, but giving them work.

“People don’t want benefits if they have an option of getting a job,” said Henning, who is a state Employment Development Department supervisor. “The President recently vetoed $6.4 billion in additional unemployment benefits. I figured that, if the government had $6.4 billion to hand out, and if they are going to keep procrastinating about finding a real solution to unemployment, then why not give us a few million (dollars) and we’ll show them how it’s done.”

Councilmen Armando Rea and Louis Heine voted against the plan. Rea called the idea a “wish list,” saying that the federal government would never give the city $20 million. Heine said he doubted that such a census would be accurate.

City officials will ask the U.S. Bureau of the Census to conduct the survey, which they estimate will cost about $25,000.