The Manhattan Times

Future doubtful for Northern Manhattan Census office

by Adam Garrett-Clark

Washington Heights and Inwood, a population historically mistrustful of the U.S. Census, will likely not have a local census office in its immediate area for the 2010 count.

Despite $120 million of stimulus money given to the census to create more jobs, local census offices (LCOs) across the country have been cut, including the one in Washington Heights.

According to the New York Regional Assistant census manager Pat Valle, Manhattan will decrease from the six offices it had in 2000 to just four LCOs for 2010.

Valle said the census has consolidated LCOs to save on the exorbitant costs of leasing locations. LCOs, designed to directly engage local areas and which can employ as many as 1,000 local residents during its peak workload, will now be spread over larger geographic areas while maintaining the same staff levels and an increase in managerial positions, Valle said.

The stimulus money, she said, went to giveaways – t-shirts, mugs and canvas bags with the census logo – to be distributed at community events and festivals. Money also went to the expansion of its partnership division, which is a specialized staff assigned with the task of creating awareness cooperation with local organizations.

Each congressional district will get one LCO according to Valle.

While the exact location and start dates of the LCOs has yet to be released, sources claim District 15’s has already been planned for Harlem.

“I think that’s a bad formula,” Aldrin Bonilla, the director of the Washington Heights local census office in 2000 said. Having that local presence made a huge difference ten years ago, he said.

In 2000 the LCO in Washington Heights received citywide recognition, garnering the highest response rate in the city.

The office on W.183rd Street and Broadway was the first office in the city to administer a hiring exam in Spanish and drew over 40,000 applicants from across the city to apply to work for the census in their native tongue.

It started over 50 satellite centers, tables manned by local census workers, in Northern Manhattan, to distribute extra forms and field questions.

At the end of the process, Community Board 12 had a 66-percent response rate to the questionnaire, ten points higher than the city average.

Despite Valle’s assertion to the contrary, a spokesperson for Congressman Charles Rangel, said there’s a chance there will be two LCOs in the district, one in Harlem and the other either in the Heights or on the Upper West Side.

Rangel, he said, met with the census throughout the summer to discuss its involvement in Northern Manhattan and has a meeting scheduled next week to talk about a local office.

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.