Census Office Opens; Major Push Pledged

By KARIMA HAYNES and SORAYA NELSON

Jan. 8, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

VAN NUYS —

From storefront churches along Van Nuys Boulevard to the homeless in shelters, everyone in the San Fernando Valley needs to be counted, census officials said Friday during the grand opening of local census offices.

“Every living, breathing person matters,” said Michael N. Carpenter, local census office manager in Van Nuys. “We count everybody and everybody counts.”

A multicultural force of 8,200 census workers will be hired for the northeast Valley, a region populated by thousands of people with diverse cultural, language and economic backgrounds.

“We will be telling everyone that being counted will mean money for schools, infrastructure and fair representation in Washington, Sacramento and City Hall,” he said. “The only way we can help people is for us to know that they are there.”

Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) urged census takers to learn about the various cultures represented in the Valley and to use that knowledge to get people to fill out census forms.

For example, he said, census takers should be aware the Latino community is predominantly Roman Catholic and workers should not hesitate to draw on the New Testament story of Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem to take part in the census.

“It is a humble responsibility that must be taken just as seriously,” he said. “People think that they don’t matter. They think they are just humble individuals who are just trying to work and feed their kids, but they must be counted if they want a responsive government.”

As the annual decennial count nears, anxiety is growing about getting the word out to the nation’s 120 million households. It is particularly difficult in diverse regions like Southern California, with large pockets of minorities and non-English speaking immigrant residents who fear or don’t trust government.

Only three in five households are expected to respond to the mailed survey, which will be sent out to most U.S. residents in mid-March.

“We anticipate having to knock on 46 million doors” to follow up, said Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt during an earlier news conference in Washington, D.C.

Such dire predictions have led to the largest effort to date to increase awareness about the census. In unprecedented numbers, civic leaders, school districts and grass-roots organizations have banded together to boost participation.

Making people aware of the census is only half the battle, local leaders said. Many residents who hear about the head count are often reluctant to take part, fearing they’ll be deported, audited by the IRS or arrested, officials said.

“Last week I even had a lady who called me demanding to know what business the government had asking about how many piercings she had in her ears,” said Leonard Lee, a census area manager who works in the regional headquarters in Van Nuys. “I told her we don’t ask that.”

Federal laws guarantee that personal information won’t be used by anyone other than census workers, a mantra recited by government officials and community leaders at every turn.

The census has been taken every 10 years without interruption since 1790. But the response rate has declined in recent surveys, down to two-thirds in 1990 and even lower for Los Angeles, where only 60% mailed back the forms.

That’s troubling to California leaders, as the count is figured to allocate public funds and reapportion state legislatures, as well as the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We are at 84 days before the [door-to-door] count begins. This area had the largest number of people missed during the 1990 census,” said Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante at the opening of an office in Los Angeles. “We don’t want California to lose three, four, five billions of dollars in resources again.”

To combat that, the federal government has spent $167 million on a 17-language TV, radio and print advertisement campaign launched in November. The state is spending another $8.7 million on its own ads.

Some community leaders worry that efforts to publicize the census are too late. As of Friday, no state money had yet been forwarded to the counties, schools or grass-roots groups.

“It’s great that the state has come up with $25 million to spend on the census. But the greatest challenge is that it’s a slow process with layers of bureaucracy,” said Louisa Ollague, who is heading the census effort for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles.

The Census Bureau this week launched a nationwide recruitment drive to hire hundreds of thousands of census takers to go door-to-door and count residents who fail to send back their form by April 1.

In Central and Southern California and Hawaii, 36,000 census takers will be hired this spring, said John Reeder, regional census director.

The temporary jobs, which pay between $11 and $14 an hour locally depending on the county, have already generated thousands of phone calls from applicants, a pool Reeder hopes to increase to 200,000.

Times staff writer Edgar Sandoval contributed to this story.

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Census Contact Information

These are the Southern California U.S. Census offices that can address questions about the decennial count and census job openings:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

Commerce (323) 890-5846

Compton (310) 537-9896

Culver City (310) 253-9540

Culver City East (310) 815-4438

East Los Angeles/Monterey Park (323) 981-3960

Glendale/Burbank (818) 551-6720

Hollywood/Mid-Wilshire (213) 251-7080