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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

High Court Won’t Allow Census Adjustment Secretary Of Commerce Acted Within Discretion, Justices Say

Knight-Ridder

Cities with large minority populations suffered a sharp defeat Wednesday when the Supreme Court unanimously rejected their pleas that the 1990 census be adjusted to make up for an admitted undercounting.

The adjustment, the cities said, would bring to minority areas hundreds of millions of dollars a year in additional federal money and greater representation in state legislatures.

“It’s inexcusable that the federal government will knowingly undercount over five million citizens,” said Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

But with little difficulty, the high court justices rejected the cities’ claims that the inaccurate count of 248,709,873 people in 1990 violated the democratic principle of equal representation and discriminated against minorities.

There has never been an error-free census in U.S. history, and the federal government made an “extraordinary effort” to count minorities in 1990, the court said. The ruling said that then-Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who rejected the request for an adjustment, was acting within his authority.

Among the winners were Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Indiana and Ohio, which feared losses of federal funds if the census was changed. In addition, Wisconsin would have lost a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to California.

The census count was challenged by a number of cities and counties, including Philadelphia; San Jose, Calif.; New York City; Los Angeles; Boston; Dade County and Broward County, Fla.; Long Beach, Calif.; Cleveland and Chicago.

The Census Bureau’s demographic data indicated that, despite special efforts to reduce the error rate, it had undercounted blacks, Hispanics and American Indians by about 5 percent and missed more than 3 percent of all Asians.

The bureau’s director, Barbara Bryant, recommended an upward adjustment that would have raised the official population by about five million to 254 million.

But President Bush’s secretary of commerce, Robert Mosbacher, overrode the bureau.

It was a decision that the Clinton administration defended and that all nine Supreme Court justices found “entirely reasonable” and well within the commerce secretary’s broad legal discretion.