Back to paper, pencils for census - GLITCHES: Use of high-tech devices will be scaled back for 2010 count.

April 4, 2008
Long Beach Press-Telegram

By Stephen Ohlemacher

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Forget those newfangled cell phones and that high-speed Internet. To conduct the 2010 Census , the government is going retro.

It's back to paper and pencil for the door-to-door count.

Years ago, the Census Bureau scrapped plans to use the Internet to help count the nation's 300million residents. On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress his department also will shelve plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don't return the census forms that come in the mail.

The decision was one of a number of changes that will add as much as $3billion to the constitutionally mandated 2010 count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14billion.

This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation's history. The Census Bureau had awarded a contract to purchase 500,000 of the handheld computers at a cost of more than $600million. The contract is now projected to balloon to $1.3billion, even though the bureau will scale back its purchase to only 151,000.

The devices, which look like fancy cell phones, will still be used to verify every residential street address in the country, with global positioning system software.

But workers going door-to-door will not be able to use them to collect information from the residents who didn't return their census forms. About one-third of U.S. residents are expected not to return the forms. The Census Bureau plans to hire and train nearly 600,000 temporary workers to do the canvassing.

Gutierrez blamed "a lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors" for many of the problems with the handheld computers.

"As I have said before, the situation today is unacceptable, and we have been taking steps to address the issues," Gutierrez, who oversees the Census Bureau, told a House Appropriations subcommittee.

In fact, interviews, congressional testimony and government reports describe an agency that was unprepared to manage the contract for the handheld computers. Census officials are being blamed for doing a poor job of spelling out technical requirements to the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp.

At one point, the Census Bureau identified more than 400 new or clarified technical requirements for the computer system, Gutierrez said.