Census workers go for the hard count

Thursday, March 30, 2000 | 11:02 a.m.

Mean dogs. Snow drifts. Desert dwellers. Outdated maps. Anti-government activists. Undocumented immigrants leery of government employees.

These are all obstacles that the Census Bureau runs up against in the far-flung reaches of Nevada.

The bureau has distributed hundreds of thousands of Census 2000 forms throughout the region, and is in the middle of an unprecedented advertising campaign to get people to respond to those forms.

So far, the campaign can chalk up at least one success: The initial response rates for Nevada stood at 46 percent on Wednesday, slightly better than the national rate of 44 percent.

Nevada is doing better than 30 other states, said David Byerman, the bureau's chief liaison with Nevada.

That is a lot better than the 1990 Census, in which Nevada ranked 45th for the initial response.

"That is a lot of progress," he said.

A good mail-in rate is important to the agency because it is eight times more expensive for a door-to-door enumerator to ask the questions at the door than to process a mailed response, Byerman said.

"We think things are going pretty well," David Hoggard Jr., manager of the Las Vegas Census Office, said. "We're right in the ballpark."

Bringing back the information will get progressively harder, since those folks most likely to readily respond to the census already have done so.

But the message from the bureau -- and state and local governments hungry for their share of federal spending -- is that getting a good response to the census is too important to let slide with a half-hearted effort.

Federal, state and local officials figure that Nevada's suspected undercount in the 1990 Census cost the region millions in returned tax dollars, by one estimate about $200 million over the last decade. Another undercount would cripple efforts to bring in federal money for new schools, roads and social services for the fastest growing metropolitan area of the country, they argue.

It is particularly important this time in Nevada, since a strong count will almost certainly give the state another member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

But the message hasn't convinced everyone of the importance of the census.

"My concerns are the instrusive nature of the questions," said Jacqueline Nelson, a law firm receptionist in the Las Vegas area. "I just have some real concerns about privacy issues."

Nelson said she doesn't believe the bureau's protestations that personal information is kept secret from other government agencies. She suspects the information goes to a central data bank.

"Many people I know are satisfying the constitutional need and the need for privacy by answering one question only: that is how many people are in the household," Nelson said.

Pam Gallion, survey manager at UNLV's Cannon Center for Survey Research, is sympathetic to the enumerators going door-to-door to pass out surveys and ask questions. Gallion administers market research surveys that often ask similar questions.

"In any survey the respondent is always skeptical of the person or institution gathering the information," Gallion said. "The big fear is that the information is going to be used against them in some way ... that there's a hidden agenda."

Those fears are echoed in letters to newspapers nationwide and in calls to talk-radio shows.

Gallion said she believes that part of the skepticism directed at the census springs from distrust of the long form.

The long form asks about household income, electrical usage, plumbing arrangements, racial and ethnic makeup and other questions that critics argue go beyond the original constitutional authorization for the census.

"People feel that it's very intrusive," Gallion said. "I would eliminate the long form. I'm skeptical of why the government would need eight pages of information from some individuals and not others."

Representatives of the census respond that they are directed by Congress to gather the information, and that both local governments and businesses use the long-form information for planning and marketing.

But that kind of market research should be left to others, Gallion said. "To combine it with a census kind of cheapens the census. I think the census should be simply a count."

George Martelon, a bureau media specialist, has heard the criticism.

"We hear more than we'd like to, although I'm not sure more than we anticipated," Martelon said. The bureau responds not by getting on talk radio and shouting, but by providing information on how the census information will help planning and the return of tax dollars, he said.

Martelon and other bureau employees know that despite their best efforts, some people will refuse to answer questions and some will slip through the cracks.

They have some legal recourse -- there is a $100 fine for refusing to answer the census, and a $500 fine for knowingly providing false information -- but prosecutions are very rare. Martelon said he knows of only one prosecution, in the early 1960s, of a person refusing to respond.

But the bureau wants to get a good count by emphasizing the importance to the community.

"We're not hurting anyone but ourselves by not participating," Martelon said.

Very few people have a problem with the census, Martelon said.

Gordon Ecklund, a 65-year-old door-to-door enumerator, agreed.

"It's important for schools, roads, for the community," Ecklund said.

Most people have actually been happy to see him, he said. Throughout the opening weeks of the census, only one person has refused to answer the questions.

In this stage of the effort, enumerators are still mostly just dropping off the surveys at households. Ecklund said he believes the effort will get harder as the field of nonresponding households gets winnowed down.

He has already had to deal with a lot. Ecklund works for the North Las Vegas bureau office, which covers the northern part of Clark County, including Mount Charleston, and Lincoln, Esmeralda and Nye counties.

That's meant a lot of miles on some lonely roads. But Ecklund pointed out that the only person refusing to take a form came from an individual in the upscale Queens Ridge subdivision on the Las Vegas Valley's west side.

He has had other difficulties, though. In the canyons of Mount Charleston, he had to deal with snow and bad roads. There, however, the residents seemed glad to see him, Ecklund said.

Throughout his short tenure as an enumerator, he has had to deal with dogs -- perhaps the worst part of the job, Ecklund said.

He has also discovered whole subdivisions that have cropped up that aren't on the map -- which means that those residents also have to get copies of the census forms.

Dot Rosino, Ecklund's boss as manager of the North Las Vegas bureau office, mentioned several additional headaches: 60 to 80 mph winds while canvassing in Pahrump, and the numerous gated communities throughout Southern Nevada, where even getting into a property to pass out the forms can be tough.

She also described "alternative housing," such as people living in shacks or in caves in remote areas of the Nevada desert. First the bureau has to know that people even live there, then the agency's enumerators have to get a form to them, Rosino said.

But Ecklund, who recently retired from a long career as a civilian employee with the Navy, said he's enjoying the $11.50-an-hour job.

"If you're positive when you go up to the door, their attitude back is positive," he said.

Launce Rake covers growth issues for the Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4127 or by e-mail at lrake@lasvegassun.com

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