Will The Count Measure Up?

With the 2010 census fast approaching, community activists noted what they call a contradiction. The feds want census workers to come from the communities they’re counting. Meanwhile, federal regulations prohibit the hiring of non-citizens.

Mayor John DeStefano welcomed several dozen people, from city agencies, non-profits, local businesses and census officials, to the Hall of Records on Orange Street Monday to kick off the city’s efforts to count every resident.

“And we understand that just getting something in the mail is not going to do that,” he said. ​“We’ve got to go knock on doors — and oftentimes, it’ll depend on who’s doing the knocking.”

Census workers will fan out across the city to visit their neighbors. Local groups and faith communities will be encouraged to hold events to educate residents — whether citizens, legal immigrants, or undocumented individuals.

Money and clout are at stake in the count, officials said.

If New Haven does a better job this time around counting all its residents, the city will gain both political clout in state and federal legislatures, and federal funding, hopefully more than the $25 million the city received for the current year. ​“I think we can do better” than barely more than half the residents filling out the census form, said City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg, the local point person for the census effort.

City and census officials emphasized the importance of hiring workers from their own communities to do that door knocking, to reduce fear on the part of some residents and also to handle the challenges of non-English speakers.

DeStefano said New Haven is considered a hard-to-count community because it is made up of 75 percent renters and many recent immigrants. Census workers will seek to track down everyone who doesn’t mail back a census form.

Kathleen Ludgate (pictured) is the director of the Boston Regional Census Center, covering New England. She said her region will run a paid ad campaign in 16 languages to try to reach everyone. She explained the benefits of counting every resident, both for political representation in Congress and for eligibility for federal grants. Click here for a list of 50 city programs funded with federal dollars.

Gilvarg said that in the 2000 census, the city’s response rate was 52 percent, while Connecticut’s was 70 percent and the national average was 67 percent. Within the city, response rates in the different census tracts varied from 35.2 percent (downtown) to 73 percent in Westville. Click here to see the map.

Ludgate explained that in the first phase of the process, workers went out to count the number of dwellings, to provide a current data base for follow-up. Newhallville Alderman Charles Blango questioned whether local people were hired for that task. The head of the Bridgeport census office (which has included New Haven up to now, though New Haven will soon get its own office) said yes — almost 300 people for Greater New Haven. which includes the city and 15 surrounding towns.

Then Sandra McKinnie, director of financial asset development at the Community Action Agency (pictured) stood up to say, ​“I, like Mr. Blango, am concerned about people being hired from the community.” She said she is also concerned about the historical under-counting of African Americans and other minorities. But she added that her agency has been a partner with the Census Bureau since February, when dozens of neighborhood residents were hired to do the dwellings count.

“So many people had no idea that this [participating in the census] could make a difference between getting more books in their kids’ schools or providing more senior services,” she said later. That’s because the funding for many federal programs is divvied up based at least partly on population.

Three times more workers than were hired already will be hired to go door to door to ask residents to fill out the form. ​“It’s ten questions in ten minutes in 2010,” Ludgate said.

In years past (dating to the birth of the nation), residents were asked to fill out the ​“long form” in every year ending in a ​“0,” i.e., every decade. In recent years the Bureau switched to the American Community Survey, which every year asks a part of the population to fill out that long form, to ensure that the detailed data will not be outdated so fast.

Norma Rodriguez Reyes (pictured at the top of the story) said she thought it was a contradiction to hire only citizens, when some of the most ​“hard to count” residents are immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants who might fear to answer any questions posed by a stranger. ​“They’re not going to trust [an outsider] as much as someone who is of their own, asking them to fill it out.”

Ludgate answered that federal law requires the hiring of citizens except in cases where citizens are not available to take the positions.

Raul Erazo Velarde (pictured), the Ecuadorean consul general for Connecticut, who’s based in New Haven, seconded Rodriguez-Reyes’s concerns. (New Haven’s recent influx of Ecuadorean immigrants prompted the establishment of the consul’s office. Click here for a story on that.) He told a reporter afterward that one must follow the law in hiring employees who are citizens, but he still hopes a way might be found to hire some non-citizens to go door to door in heavily immigrant neighborhoods.