Census officials: Accuracy criticisms about El Paso count are premature

Ramon Bracamontes
El Paso Times
August 18, 2010

EL PASO -- Politicians are premature in voicing criticisms that El Paso's population count is inaccurate, U.S. Census Bureau officials said Tuesday.

The bureau is refining its count, and it has not released any estimates for 2010, a spokeswoman said.

The response from the Census Bureau came the day after several elected officials in El Paso questioned the bureau's methods, saying at a public hearing that El Paso County may be undercounted by 100,000 people. The Census Bureau's 2009 estimate placed El Paso County's population at 751,296.

"We are trying to do everything on our end to make sure our data is correct," said Jenna Arnold, a Census Bureau spokeswoman for the Dallas regional office. "We are now calling people, we are going back to homes that were vacant, and we are going to addresses where there was no response. The process is not over."

The official census count will not be released until 2011, she said.

State Rep. Chente Quintanilla, D-El Paso, was one of several elected officials who questioned the bureau's effectiveness during a Texas House of Representatives redistricting hearing. He also sent the Census Bureau a letter stating that he was confident that up to 50,000 people living in Socorro, San Elizario and a colonia in Montana Vista were "alienated" from the process.

"I ask that indisputable evidence is provided showing how your 'process' accurately counted over 50,000 residents who were excluded from the initial mail response part of the census that started in March and ended April 1," Quintanilla stated in his letter. He sent it last week, and he said the bureau had not answered him.

Arnold said the communities Quintanilla mentioned were counted. She said they were first visited in 2007 when bureau workers asked governments in El Paso to provide a complete list of mailing addresses. Census workers in 2009 walked the neighborhoods to obtain an address for every home or apartment.

And on April 1, census workers and the Census Road Bus were in the colonias and in Socorro asking people to fill out forms, she said.

"We did some mail delivery. We put forms on doorsteps in rural areas or where there was a high percentage of P.O. boxes, and we went door to door where census workers helped people fill out the form," Arnold said. "The goal is to count people in the right place, where they live."

During Monday's hearing, several elected officials also questioned whether the bureau took into account all of the Fort Bliss soldiers who will be moving into El Paso next year and whether people moving from Ju?rez to El Paso are being counted.

Arnold said the bureau worked with Fort Bliss to get the number of soldiers now assigned to the post. But the bureau will not count soldiers who will be stationed at Fort Bliss starting in 2011.

Moreover, she said, anyone who moved from Mexico to El Paso after April 1 was not and will not be counted.

"The census count is a snapshot of the nation on a certain date," she said. "That date is April 1. Even babies born on April 10 were not counted and will not be counted."

The same rule applies to every city, she said.

The concern El Paso's elected officials have about the census count is twofold. First, if the count for this county is artificially low, El Paso may lose a state representative seat. Second, the lower the count, the less federal money will be sent to El Paso.

Jos? Rodr?guez, a former El Paso County attorney, told the state committee on Monday that because of an undercount in El Paso in 2000, this area lost $34.7 million in federal funding. The federal government allocates money to counties based on census counts.

He cited a national study done by the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimating that in 2000 El Paso was undercounted by the Census Bureau by 1.59 percent, or about 14,000 people. The audit of the Census Bureau count was ordered by President George W. Bush in 2002.