Count the Ways These People Help You

The guy was calling from a local watering hole. He wanted to know if Reina Ornelas could settle a bet.

Which city, he asked her, has the most Latinos--Los Angeles or New York?

He wasn’t happy about the answer, but at least he called the right place. Reina Ornelas is a “community services specialist” at the U.S. Census Bureau’s regional office in Van Nuys. Here, in a modern office building on Sherman Way just east of Sepulveda, four federal employees serve the public’s thirst for statistics--even when that thirst is primed by alcohol.

Now, the nice people at the census bureau want you to know that it isn’t every day that your tax dollars are being spent to settle bar bets. Usually, their concerns are more important. Sometimes they have time to answer the odd question over the phone and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are too busy assisting people who are engaged in serious research. This obscure federal office--the only such census library in California--is routinely used as a resource by business interests large and small, as well as other government agencies, scholars and, of course, the media.

“You guys are lazy,” said Tina Stewart, an “information assistant.” “You always call when we’re about to leave, saying ‘I’m on deadline!’ ”

But the media, at least, may not be as bad as another breed.

“Students,” Jerry Wong muttered. “They want you to do their homework assignments!”

Wong, an “information services specialist” who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA, says he reminds students that they are supposed to do their own research.

Wong, a Los Angeles native, began his career with the census bureau in 1977, moving to Washington to help design and administer the bureau’s first community services program for the 1980 census. As part of his responsibilities now, he trains people on the uses of census data for market research. A former chairman of the city’s Lotus Festival, touted as the nation’s largest annual Asian/Pacific multicultural event, Wong also speaks frequently before academic and chamber of commerce groups about cultural diversity and demographic trends.

With such a resume, it was a little disappointing that Wong couldn’t tell me off the top of his head how many people live in the United States, according to the 1990 census. Wong remembered the first six digits (248,709) but had to look up the last three (873).

The office is a cornucopia of data. The United States first started to make measurements of itself in 1790. In addition to the census every household is expected to fill out every 10 years, the bureau also conducts economic surveys in the years ending in 2 and 7. The last two, for example, were in 1987 and 1992. On the day I dropped by, one man was busy researching imports and exports.

“You should have been here yesterday,” Wong said. “We had all five phone lines lit up.”

This was a slow day--slow enough for Wong, Ornelas and Stewart to join me at a table. As President Clinton might put it, we looked like America: two guys, white and Asian, and two women, Latina and black.

Some of the most useful information is the most detailed. Entrepreneurs will study income and ethnic makeup of census tracts in deciding where to open businesses. The information also is helpful to community groups. To assess the needs for anti-gang programs, Ornelas helped a Neighborhood Watch group determine how many teen-age boys and girls lived in a community.

Sometimes the public needs help with questions as well as answers. Not long ago, Stewart says, an activist from Watts involved in efforts to bring a cinema into the community needed to know age and ethnic makeup of the community. Stewart suggested that she might also want to know how many people speak English and how many speak Spanish. The caller realized that was relevant too.

Sometimes, they say, people call expecting to find info that the census bureau just doesn’t have. One caller, Stewart recalled, was interested in the chubbiness of America. Out of those 248,709,873 people counted in the 1990 census, how many are overweight?

“The Jenny Craig people would want to know that,” Stewart suggested.

As nominees for “stupidest question,” Wong offers this: “For what year does the 1990 census relate to?” And, “Do you happen to know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Ornelas remembered the bar bet. The caller was disappointed when she tracked down the answer. It was New York. To be precise, the 1990 census found the “Hispanic origin” count in New York to be 1,783,511; in L.A., it was 1,391,411. As a percentage of the population, Los Angeles’ Latino community is much larger than New York’s. But, as the shrewd bettor must have known, the Big Apple, with a population of 7,332,564, is more than double the size of the City of Angels, which has a population of 3,485,398.

Los Angeles County, incidentally, was found to have a population of 8,863,164 in the 1990 census.

At least that’s what Jerry Wong told me at 3:57 p.m. on Friday. The office closes at 4. I caught him just in time.

Hey, I was on deadline.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.