Countdown

arvin Raines is worried about pencils. Not just handfuls or even boxfuls of pencils, but 1.5 million of them. They will have to be distributed to hundreds of Census Bureau offices, most of which haven't opened yet, and then passed on to hundreds of thousands of employees, most of whom haven't been hired yet.

"It's a massive planning situation to try to deal with all the logistics--all the people, all the furniture, all the training manuals you've got to put together," says Raines, associate census director for field operations. "You've got to worry about the 500-and-some-odd locations around the country--making sure we have space, computer equipment that all works, something as simple as chairs. You've got to make sure you've got enough pencils and that they get to where they've got to get to so they have something to write with."

April 1, 2000, is officially the next Census Day, but at the Census Bureau the big count is well under way. Planning started soon after the 1990 census ended. More recently, the bureau has conducted dress rehearsals in three areas and has put more than 100,000 people to work building a new national mailing address list.

Over the next year, the agency, whose permanent field structure consists of about 3,500 employees and 12 regional offices, will expand to 520 offices, test some 3 million people for potential temporary positions, hire and train about 850,000 of them, send them out to knock on millions of doors, collate information from hundreds of millions of forms, and then shut down the entire operation.

Some agencies are larger in terms of employees, offices and structure, but none has to do what the Census Bureau does--set up a mammoth operation and tear it all down quickly, with virtually no room for disruptions during the short period of peak operations. Agency officials say there's virtually no model, inside or outside of government, for what they do.

In the 2000 census, the bureau will be making greater use of technology than ever, integrating address lists and geographic data, providing enumerators with laptop computers pre-loaded with census information, decentralizing administrative functions such as payroll processing, and using improved methods to capture and analyze data. But several demographic and cultural trends are working against the agency. And political wrangling between the White House and Congress over how the count should be done has further complicated the job.

Declining Response Rates

Planning for a census begins with a basic principle: The more people who mail back the census form, the less work there will be for the bureau. So the mailing of questionnaires to about 120 million households will be both preceded and followed by publicity efforts encouraging people to respond.

The forms have been redesigned to make them more readable and user-friendly. The short version, which 83 percent of housing units will receive, is even shorter than it was a decade ago. It will take only about 10 minutes to complete, versus 14 minutes for the 1990 version. Census officials will issue constant reminders, in the form of advertisements, promotional announcements and other outreach efforts, that filling out the form ensures accurate apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and proper distribution of government funding to localities.

But even with all that, the Census Bureau knows it is in for a difficult time in getting people to respond. The bureau has hard evidence of declining response rates.In the 1990 census, the mail response rate fell by 10 percentage points, from 75 percent in the 1980 census to 65 percent.

One result was that the undercount increased; the 1990 census was the first deemed to be less accurate than the one that preceded it. About 8.4 million people were missed, and another 4 million were double-counted. The overall undercount rate was 1.6 percent, but it was much higher among minority groups: 12.2 percent for American Indians on reservations, 5 percent among Hispanics and 4.4 percent among African-Americans.

"It is our perception that the 2000 census will be moving upstream against cynicism, against fear, against an unwillingness to be cooperative toward any kind of government programs," says Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt. "We're already running into it, even in block canvassing, where people slam the door on us and say, 'Why should I cooperate with this?' We're not asking them to do anything, just simply verify the address.

"We know there's a lot of fear. There are much higher immigrant populations. There are more linguistically isolated populations. We know the census form has got to fight its way through a much larger stack of junk mail in 2000 than it did in 1990," he adds.

With a larger population to count--an estimated 275 million--and with plans to do both a full enumeration and a count supplemented by statistical sampling, the bureau's job in 2000 already will be bigger than it was in 1990. A drop in response rates would worsen the problem--and bureau officials now expect a response rate next year of about 61 percent. "If it drops much below 61 percent, we will have both operational and budgetary challenges, serious ones," Prewitt says. "If it moves above 61 percent--which, of course, we hope--then we will be able to use more of our resources to find those last, difficult-to-reach cases."

Reaching Out

Barriers to obtaining voluntary participation from all Americans include not only cultural and language difficulties but also increased concerns about privacy in a digitized world and outright hostility to anything associated with government. "Our experience in 1990 showed us that some targeted audiences that are hard to persuade need more information about why it's important and more reassurance that it's confidential," says Jennifer Marks, assistant division chief of the Census 2000 publicity office. "We certainly learned that mistrust is growing and we had to do something to combat that."

Since 1990, the bureau has revamped its marketing program. Besides changes to the forms, other efforts include production of new fact sheets, novelty items, news articles, and special events, possibly to include a national road tour with vehicles starting from each coast. The "Census in the Schools" program also has been beefed up, on the theory that children are an effective way to get a message to parents.

One of the more significant changes is the addition of paid advertising, ranging from billboards to prime-time television ads. Previously, the Census Bureau had simply distributed public service announcements hoping that media organizations would run them. The new ad campaign, estimated to cost more than $100 million, will begin in November with messages addressing the importance of the census and providing assurances of confidentiality.

The main ad campaign will be accompanied by smaller campaigns targeted at groups least likely to respond to the questionnaire, including African-American, African, Caribbean, Spanish-speaking and American Indian population segments. Advertising will go out in 15 languages. "We had evaluations that showed that in 1990 the average person was exposed to census advertising 65 times. I, for one, don't remember any of it," says Marks. "It was very uneven. Most of the messages went to part of the population and the remainder got almost nothing. That's the kind of thing that happens with a public service campaign when you're just looking for free space."

The Census Bureau also is stepping up its use of partnerships to encourage people to cooperate with census enumerators. The agency has doubled its in-house staff devoted to pursuing partnerships to about 600 employees. Partners include state, local and tribal governments, national organizations ranging from labor unions to Goodwill Industries, community-based organizations, local businesses and the media. The main message they are being asked to convey is that being counted brings government dollars and political representation to a community.

"They are the gatekeepers, they are the community leaders, they know their communities far better than the Census Bureau ever will," says Brenda August, branch chief of the bureau's partnership and data services branch. "We know that a number of persons who are undocumented in this country are fearful of the census or any type of government-related activity. There are others who are fearful in general--they might fear that information collected by the census may be given to the landlord, the FBI, the INS, whoever. Those are the challenges we face in motivating the community that the census is a very safe thing to do, and that we have no affiliation nor do we plan to give information to any other government agency or to anyone."

The bureau takes a wide reading of who is a community leader. "We reach out to everyone, because our goal is to count everyone," says August. "This is one national activity that touches all segments of the population. In order to succeed in that, we have to be sure that our strategy includes outreaching to the entire country."

Political, Practical Problems

Any government initiative that determines how tax dollars and representation in Congress will be apportioned inevitably brings politics into play. Given the near-balance in the House between Democrats and Republicans, it's hardly surprising that the upcoming census has become a political football.

The heart of the conflict was the agency's plan to address the undercount problem by supplementing the actual count with statistical sampling. Congressional Republicans challenged that approach, saying sampling was simply an effort to increase the numbers of minority groups, who have traditionally supported Democrats. In January, the Supreme Court ruled that sampling was illegal for purposes of apportioning House seats. The high court, however, did not address other uses of the figures, such as allocating government grants. The administration then announced that it would perform both types of counts.

Also, the fiscal 1999 appropriations bill covering the bureau contained an unusual clause cutting off funds on June 15, pending resolution of the sampling dispute. After waiting until a few weeks before the deadline, the parties agreed that continued disputes over methodology would have to be settled in court, not in Congress, and provided supplemental fiscal 1999 funds. Soon afterward, the agency sent up another request for supplemental 1999 funding, largely reflecting the increased costs of doing both types of counts.

"It's very difficult to plan a census not knowing for certain what the design is and not knowing for certain if you might be facing a shutdown for an undetermined period of time," says Prewitt. "Of course, there have been lesser uncertainties, even after the Supreme Court decision, because of the need to change the design in substantial ways, and thus the requirement of supplemental funding in '99."

"They have made it complicated for themselves," responds Chip Walker, communications director for the House census subcommittee. "I say that because Congress in 1997 passed a law and appropriated money that said Census would prepare along a dual track, for full enumeration and the statistical sampling they wanted to use. We believe they were putting more resources toward the statistical sampling side of the equation than toward the full enumeration.

"If they are behind--and we believe they are slightly behind--that's because they didn't prepare as the law required. They were essentially holding out, hoping that they were going to win the court case, and they lost the court case."

The fighting about which type of count is better has upset planning that in some cases was years in the making. For example, the decision to go to a full enumeration meant a need to open 44 more offices than had been planned and to realign many others. It also has meant increased hiring. The bureau now plans to hire up to 850,000 workers, 200,000 more than it had originally planned and 300,000 more than were hired in 1990.

Of course, all 850,000 people won't be sent out at once. The number of census employees at any given time will vary according to how many people fill different positions at different stages of the census, particularly next spring and summer when enumerators will go out to count people who didn't respond to the questionnaires. Also, turnover in the ranks of temporary workers is high--enumerators frequently are chased by dogs and physically threatened, sometimes with weapons. The agency front-loads its hiring to be sure to have enough people on hand throughout the census.

Still, hiring hundreds of thousands of people for temporary, part-time jobs that involve night and weekend work, sometimes with risk, at moderate pay is no small task. The economy is roaring, and many agencies are having trouble filling just a few much more attractive positions.

"To us, [850,000 is] not a terribly daunting number, because in the past censuses we've had very high targets as well. We have a tremendous amount of experience in this," says Janet Cummings, assistant field division chief responsible for recruiting. The agency uses traditional means, such as classified advertising in local newspapers, as well as fliers, transit posters, word of mouth, state employment offices, outreach to community organizations, and other forms of advertising. But bureau officials have found the most effective recruitment method is a direct-mail campaign to send postcards to people in hard-to-recruit areas.

Recruiting has gone well so far, officials say, in part because a new salary system allows more flexibility in pay rates. The agency hasn't yet analyzed who is taking jobs, but most of those hired are people who don't need or want to work full time, such as retirees, and people who have other jobs but are free to work night or weekend hours. (Most federal agencies have agreements exempting their employees from dual employment restrictions for temporary census jobs).

Finding and equipping office space to house the census employees can be challenging. Building owners prefer longer leases than the Census Bureau is offering, and office space often must be altered to fit the standard census office layout: a large open area with few private offices. The bureau previously negotiated its own leases but has partnered with the General Services Administration for this census.

Opening one of the offices requires purchasing a wide range of office supplies and setting up fax, phone, computer and security systems. But the work must be done on a tight schedule, with virtually no room for delays or breakdowns. Almost all the operations are done by contractors and almost all of the equipment is leased--except for the cardboard desks used by nearly everyone except office managers. Those desks are so badly beat up by the end of the process that they are discarded.

"The one thing that just jumps out at you is that the people in these offices, even the managers, are not Census Bureau employees and are not trained in the bureaucracy," says Hugh Brennan, special assistant for space logistics in the office of field operations. "A lot of these people have never worked with a lessor, for example, when a lock breaks. The telephone system . . . copiers and fax equipment may be new to them. We've got to train them all from scratch. Other than a military operation, in my 30 years of working for Uncle Sam I've never seen anything like it."

Most census officials agree--and say that's why they find the project attractive. Getting the entire country to participate in anything is as much a thrill as a challenge. "There is no other civic event that requires the whole nation to participate," says Raines. "Nothing else even comes close."

For most temporary census managers, the job is unlike anything they've ever done or are likely to do elsewhere--unless they come back for the next one, which many of them do. "I tell my wife virtually every week how much I love this job, because it's so much fun," says Caldwell. "The challenge and the accomplishment that you have are virtually on a daily basis, versus many other government jobs that I've had, where if you see something that you've been working on for two or three years actually come to fruition, you're lucky."

Conducting the census requires

• Leasing and equipping office space equivalent to 1.5 Empire State Buildings
• Pencils that if laid end-to-end would stretch 125 miles
• Enumerator manuals that if stacked would reach 1,300 stories high
• 50 million daily payroll forms
• Extension cords stretching 40,000 feet
• About 15,000 chairs and desks
• Questionnaires that if laid side-by-side would stretch from Chicago to Tokyo and back and would weigh as much as 100 737 jet airplanes.

Eric Yoder is a Washington-based journalist with 18 years of experience covering the government.