Census takers heading for final roundup

Tuesday, May 30, 2000 | 11:35 a.m.

Census offices around the Las Vegas Valley are closing in on the final days of their once-a-decade effort to count every soul.

Hundreds of enumerators, or door-to-door data collectors, are still knocking on doors. But the Las Vegas office, which covers most of the valley's central area, will end its "nonresponse follow-up" Wednesday, David Hoggard Jr., the Las Vegas office manager, said.

Hoggard said the office will have at least some information on 100 percent of the more than 68,000 households in his coverage area.

The North Las Vegas office still has more than 700 people in the field, Dot Rosino, manager of that office, said.

"Things are going quite well," she said. Recent triple-digit temperatures have contributed to the loss of some enumerators, but the office is adding new workers through regular training, Rosino said.

"We are losing some because of the heat," she said. "That seems to be the major problem right now. But we're keeping our staffing where it needs to be."

Rosino said her office has covered 87 percent of the households during the nonresponse follow-up, which targets homes where people didn't mail back their census forms.

Helen Myers, manager of the Henderson office, said Friday that her office has covered 84 percent of the households in her territory -- the bottom third of Clark County -- and will keep going for several weeks.

Her office covers some of the newest housing in the Las Vegas Valley, so enumerators have to ensure that they have covered all the new construction, Myers said.

Rosino and her colleagues said getting the last few to respond is the toughest part of the census. Rosino said her office's enumerators will make numerous attempts to reach people who haven't yet been counted. Knocks on doors and phone calls will go to those households that didn't mail back the original census form delivered to the home.

The local effort was heavily promoted throughout the community. Many state and local elected officials and government employees pushed the federal effort. Government officials figure that up to $200 million in federal money was lost to the region because of Nevada's 1990 Census undercount. The federal government uses the census data to figure where to spend tax money.

Nationally and locally, some people expressed concerns about the census, especially what they considered overly intrusive questions in the so-called long form.

But Dave Byerman, the census' chief liaison with Nevada, said the vast majority of people understand the importance of the census to local services.

The improvement in the rate of response to the mail-in census form was second best in the country, he said, exceeded only by Massachusetts. In 1990 Nevada ranked 45th out of the 50 states for the mail-in return.

He said some areas, such as Pahrump, are still getting a serious follow-up to the mail-in effort.

"We're very concerned that Pahrump get an accurate count because it has grown so dramatically in the last 10 years," Byerman said. "This will give us the opportunity to make the case that we have given people the chance to have their voice heard."

Many census workers will continue with an extended check of their work known as the coverage improvement follow-up, which starts in most areas in July and should finish within about one month.

But some workers, such as Byerman and Hoggard and thousands of enumerators, will hang up their clipboards by the end of June. Many of those workers have put in hundreds of hours of overtime since the effort kicked into high gear earlier this year.

"I think I'll take a little vacation and go back to my golf," Hoggard said.