Census dilemma looms over redistricting

Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

The Census Bureau is almost certain to announce population figures Thursday that will grant Nevada another seat in the House of Representatives.

But those numbers, an actual head count of raw state population figures, represent the easy part. For state legislatures around the country, including Nevada, the harder part will be figuring out what to do with the more detailed breakdown of population, which will come in March.

Political leaders in the state may have the headache of picking from two sets of numbers: the actual head count, which critics charge will omit thousands of low-income, minority and urban dwellers; and a "statistically adjusted" count that critics on the other side characterize as a questionable "guesstimate" at best.

The issue could become one of a handful of contested partisan issues during the upcoming session of the Nevada Legislature, which convenes late next month.

"It's typical partisan issue," state Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, said. "That will be one of the first political fights."

Popular wisdom has it that the adjusted figures would help Democrats, while the actual numbers are better for Republicans. That's because census workers have a tougher time counting everybody in dense, urban areas, stamping grounds for the Democrats, than the workers have counting households in Republican-friendly suburbs.

Federal law, which the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld, bars the use of the adjusted figures for doling out seats to the U.S. House. But the law does not address the issue of using the numbers within a state for distributing, for example, seats in the Nevada Senate or Assembly, state Board of Regents and state Board of Education.

The Census Bureau has a blue-ribbon group of analysts from the bureau, other government agencies and academia to decide which figures are best to use. The bureau could release the hard count, the adjusted figures or both.

The committee is supposed to make a recommendation to bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt in February. Prewitt has said he'll make the final decision on which figures to use.

He may not have to. President-elect George W. Bush and some campaign staffers have been publicly critical of the use of adjusted figures, and he will become Prewitt's boss Jan. 20.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the president-elect supports "an actual head count because he believes it is the best and most accurate way to conduct the census," but has not said whether he will block the public release of figures derived from sampling methods.

Democrats -- federally and locally -- argue that the adjusted figures are more correct. However, Census 2000, which put thousands of temporary workers on the streets to theoretically tally every person living in the country, is probably more accurate than previous counts, the bureau has said.

But even so, thousands of people were certainly missed. Historically, some people just never bother to respond to repeated mailings and door-to-door visits.

In March some congressional Republicans also attacked the 53-item, so-called "long form" for being overly intrusive. The public weighed in on editorial pages and radio talk shows, causing some problems for part-time census workers hired to go door-to-door to ask the questions.

In 1990 the Census Bureau estimated it undercounted about 1.4 percent of the population nationwide, mostly children, the poor, minorities and inner-city residents.

A 1 percent undercount of Nevada's estimated 2 million people would represent 20,000 people -- a potentially important issue, since federal and state dollars would be allocated to deal with their social services, transportation demands and other funding needs.

That's a population almost as big as the entire town of Pahrump and bigger than Mesquite or Boulder City.

But not everyone is convinced the undercount will be a significant problem in Nevada. Jeff Hardcastle, the Nevada State demographer, said the bureau appeared to do a good job, so he doesn't expect that there will be a wide deviation between the adjusted number and the raw count.

Assemblyman Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, said he also doesn't expect the difference to be significant.

"I think perhaps Sen. Titus is looking for a fight, but I don't believe that's going to be a major bone of contention," Beers said. The assemblyman serves on the Elections, Procedures and Ethics Committee, which will play a central role in drawing new district lines -- and if necessary, determining which federal set of numbers to use.

Beers said a far more important issue for the Legislature is redistributing power from the northern and rural areas to Southern Nevada, an issue that to some degree transcends partisan lines.

"The assembly race with the most votes cast last November had over 40,000 votes; the one with the least had 3,000," he said. That "wild disparity in district population" had led to a loss of representation for voters in Clark County, Beers argued.

More than half of the state's votes for assembly came from Southern Nevada, but only 34 percent of the assembly seats are in the south, he said.

"We are so far out of whack right now that the issue of statistical adjustments versus actual counts of people is irrelevant," Beers said.

One thing everybody agrees on: The population for Nevada is going to be bigger than ever before, and states in the "Rust Belt" Northeast are going to lose representation.

Unless there is "a horrible surprise," Nevada will get a new federal representative, said Robert Erickson, research director for the state's Legislative Counsel Bureau, which has to crunch the numbers and provide them to the legislators for final action.

The Legislature will have to draw the lines of the new district, and it will likely affect the district of Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., Erickson said. Gibbons' district includes all of the state except the heart of Clark County's urban core, which is held by Democrat Rep. Shelley Berkley.

The legislators also will have to wrestle with the number and district size for seats in the Assembly, Senate, state education board and regents. But all of that has to wait until the full, detailed federal numbers are released in mid-March, Erickson said.

He would like those numbers as soon as possible, since the session is scheduled to end June 4. Erickson said the timing of the data release won't give the Legislative Counsel Bureau staff, legislators and consultants that they may hire, or the public much time to cobble together a complex redistricting scenario.

Without direction from the Census Bureau or Legislature, one thing the Legislative Counsel Bureau won't be doing right away is writing draft legislation reflecting different scenarios.

"That's tremendously time consuming," Erickson said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.