State’s 57% Census Return Rate Proves Disappointing

Only 57% of California’s residents had returned their census forms by last weekend--13% below the expected response rate and almost 20% below that reached at this point in the 1980 census--federal officials said Monday.

John Reeder, director of the regional census office in Van Nuys, said the response rate was the same disappointing 57% for Los Angeles County and was probably about the same for the nation as a whole.

He said that undelivered forms--blamed in part on errors by the U.S. Postal Service, but mostly on mistakes by the Census Bureau--were part of the problem.

“But in the main,” he said, “the low response is because people haven’t filled out their forms and sent them in. . . . We’re not sure why.”

Reeder said experience has shown that the response “tails off dramatically” after April 10--10 days after the questionnaires mailed to residents were supposed to be returned by mail. Within the next few days, he said, the Census Bureau will have to resort to a much more expensive way of making its count--”completing its job on the doorsteps of the nation.”

Thousands of “enumerators” are being culled from a pool of more than 100,000 applicants to finish the census count by personally interviewing those who failed to respond by mail.

Reeder said that using these census takers--paid between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour in California--will cost American taxpayers about $10 million for each percentage point the mail-in response falls below the anticipated return rate of 70%. The cost for California alone will be about $1 million a percentage point.

“April 1 was not a deadline,” he said. “We’re saying, ‘If you haven’t sent those forms in yet, please do it now.’ ”

Reeder said that according to the figures tabulated last Friday, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties did a little better than Los Angeles County, with a combined response rate of 63%. That tied them with the Sacramento area for the best rate in the state. Orange County followed closely with 62%.

San Bernardino County did a little worse, with 54%, as did Riverside County, with 53%. The region with the worst rate was the Monterey-Salinas region, where computer glitches dropped the figure to 44%. In the city of Los Angeles, the sampling district with the best return rate was San Pedro, with 63%, followed by the West San Fernando Valley, with 61%, and Panorama City, with 58%. Central Los Angeles checked in with 53%, followed by Hollywood, with 51%, and the South-Central section of the city, with 48%.

Other local sampling districts included Pasadena, 66%; La Verne, 59%; Santa Monica and Burbank, 55%; Inglewood, 54%, and Compton, 51%.

The highest sampling district in the state was Concord, with 67%. The lowest was Fresno, where computer problems contributed to a return rate of 36%.