Feds Say Count On An Improved Census

Still smarting from criticism of the 1990 U.S. Census, federal officials Tuesday promised that the nationwide count in 2000 would be more accurate, less expensive - and not quite as nosy.

“We can do better. We must do better. And we will do better,” Barbara Farnsworth Riche, Census Bureau director, said at a news conference announcing plans for the turn-of-the-century census.

She outlined an approach that will include a direct-mail blitz of all households in the country and the use of computers that can read handwritten forms.

Those forms also will be shorter, Riche said. To save money and preserve privacy, some traditional questions - about ancestry and prior residences, for instance - are being dropped. “We’ve been told we ask too many questions,” Riche said, “that they are intrusive.”

A controversial query may be added, however, under which children of mixed-race marriages would be able to identify themselves as “multiracial.”

The stakes for an accurate count are high because census numbers help determine federal funding for communities, which currently amounts to about $417 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

While 98 percent accurate, the 1990 census missed 4 million households, Riche said, and prompted lawsuits by communities claiming the undercount cheated them of federal funds.

Philadelphia lost an estimated $6 million in federal community-development block grants due to a low count of the city’s poor in 1990, Mayor Ed Rendell said Tuesday.