L.A. Sues in Effort to Get an Adjusted Census Count

In the latest battle over whether to statistically adjust the 2000 census, Los Angeles city officials Wednesday filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to bar the Bush administration’s Commerce Department director from administering the data.

The request for a temporary restraining order is a bid to keep open the option of using scientific sampling to determine the U.S. population, rather than basing it solely on the number of Americans who responded last year.

The suit came days after Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans appointed himself to lead the count, taking authority out of the hands of the director of the Census Bureau. The change was widely seen as a sign that federal officials probably will rely only on numbers gathered last year by mail and door-to-door interviews, a method that typically undercounts racial and ethnic minorities.

Historically, Democrats have favored an adjusted count, while Republicans have favored the original census, with each side accusing the other of simply wanting to assure itself of more seats in the House of Representatives.

“We want to make sure we leave this decision in the hands of professionals and take it away from politicians,” said City Atty. James K. Hahn, a Democrat who is running for mayor and announced the suit.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles federal court, charges that Evans--who took over the census from acting Census Director William G. Barron on Friday--violated federal law because his agency did not allow for public discussion before he replaced Barron. The law, the city argues, requires that comment be considered on such changes that that involve a matter of concern to the general public.

Commerce officials, who consulted with the Department of Justice before making the move, believe the change is “an agency management decision that is exempt from the notice and comment rule-making procedures” of the law, according to a memo from the Justice Department’s legal office.

The policy the Bush administration canceled was adopted during the Clinton administration. It would have permitted the census director to decide which set of numbers should become the measure of the nation’s population.

Census officials were scheduled to decide on whether to release the original or adjusted count by Feb. 28. Now, a census advisory committee will make a recommendation to Evans by that date, and the Commerce secretary will decide in the first week of March which method to use, said a Commerce spokesman.

Other plaintiffs include Inglewood, Santa Clara County, Stamford, Conn., and San Antonio.

The 1990 tally was based solely on responses after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Los Angeles and other cities that sued to force sampling. Subsequent studies found that 838,000 people in California were uncounted by the census--a gap resulting in a loss of about $2 billion in federal funds.