[CTPP] FW: Latest Census News Brief

Usually Ed Christopher sends these along to the listserv, but he is on vacation until Oct 19. ------------------------------------------------- October 2, 2003 CENSUS NEWS BRIEF Senate Budget Cuts Could Reduce 2004 Test Sites, Geographic Partnerships, TIGER Updating, Census Bureau Says Plus: Census Bureau Operating Under Continuing Funding Resolution; Decennial Census Advisory Committee To Meet Next Week. The Census Bureau would cancel one of two remaining field test sites in 2004, nearly eliminate its Geographic Partnership Program, and reduce by more than half its planned workload for realigning geographic features in the TIGER database, if Congress adopts funding levels proposed by a Senate committee, the agency warned. In a statement analyzing the impact of fiscal year 2004 (FY04) funding levels contained in the Commerce, Justice, and State, The Judiciary and Related Agencies Appropriations bill (S. 1585), the Bureau said it would cut $20 million from census redesign activities and $25 million from the MAF/TIGER Enhancements Program. The proposed $45 million reduction in 2010 census planning funds requested by the Bush Administration would dramatically and permanently change the reengineering effort,and reduce hoped-for savings from a redesigned census by over $1.0 billion. The Senate committee did not specify which 2010 activities the proposed lower funding level would affect. The Census Bureau requested $112.1 million in FY04 to design a short-form only 2010 census. Current plans include a major field test in 2004 in portions of Queens County, New York, and three rural counties in Georgia. The funding level proposed by the Senate committee would force it to cancel the Georgia test site, increasing the risk to coverage and mobile computing device (MCD) procedures,and to reduce the New York test site by half, the agency said. The Bureau would eliminate all evaluations in the New York test except mail out/mail back and non-response follow-up procedures, including planned tests of foreign language efforts, collection of race and ethnic data, and group quartersenumeration. The Census Bureau announced earlier this year that it had scrapped plans for a third test site in Lake County, Illinois. The agency also said that it would cancel two of three test sites (France, Kuwait, and Mexico) for counting private American citizens living abroad, which would increase the risk of no overseas census in 2010. The Census Bureau also would stop preparations for testing wider use of mobile computing devices in fiscal year 2006 and beyond, the statement warned, leading to less reliance on new technology in the field during the census. The Bureau hopes that census takers can use hand-held computers to locate housing units on electronic maps and to collect information from households without using paper questionnaires. Last month, Associate Director Preston J. Waite told a meeting of the National Research Councils Panel on Research on Future Census Methods that hand-held computers (PDAs) are the centerpiece of savingsin a reengineered census, because they can reduce the need for paper materials, such as questionnaires, maps, and payroll forms, and lower associated costs for processing and storage. These reductions, totaling $1.0 billion in savings, would be severely limitedif the Census Bureau does not receive the funds it requested, the agency said in its impact statement. The Bureau requested $83.3 million to continue updating its electronic geographic database (TIGER) and address lists (Master Address File, or MAF) and modernizing the system software. Without these funds, the Bureau cautioned, it would virtually eliminate the Geographic Partnership Program with state, local, and Tribal governments and reduce Community Address Updating System activities, the only source of rural new construction addressesfor the American Community Survey, by 50 percent. The Bureau also would cut from 600 to 275 the number of counties that would have misaligned geographic features fixed in FY04. The uncompleted work would be pushed back to future years, add[ing] greatly to the riskthat all 3,200 counties will not be realigned by the Bureaus 2008 deadline. Congress passes Continuing Funding Resolution: The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY04 Commerce spending bill on September 4, but the full Senate has yet to take up the measure. Congress passed a temporary funding bill last week, to keep federal agencies for which a regular appropriations bill has not been signed into law operating past the end of fiscal year 2003 on September 30. The so-called Continuing Resolution, which keeps spending at FY03 levels, runs through October 31. Congressional sources familiar with the appropriations process say that House of Representatives and Senate negotiators are likely to meet and resolve differences between the House-passed version (H.R. 2799) and the Senate committee version (S. 1585) of the Commerce-Justice-State spending bill, bypassing Senate consideration of the measure. Traditionally, all members of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Commerce, Justice, State, and The Judiciary serve on the conference committee. Congress is likely to roll the completed Commerce bill into an omnibus appropriations measure covering many government agencies, which in turn might be attached to a supplemental spending bill the President requested to pay for U.S. operations in Iraq. The House of Representatives allocated $662 million for the Census Bureau in FY04, the full amount requested by the Bush Administration. Decennial Census Advisory Committee to meet next week: The Decennial Census Advisory Committee will meet on October 9 10 at Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, MD. The meeting will run from 9:00 AM 5:00 PM on October 9, and from 8:30 AM 12:15 PM on October 10, and is open to the public. The agenda includes general updates from Census Bureau officials; presentations on the Bureaus Data Stewardship Program, 2010 census planning, and enumerating Americans abroad; comments by congressional staff; and working group sessions on small populations, language, data quality, and race and ethnicity. The Census Bureaus five Race and Ethnic Advisory Committees (REACs), representing the African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander populations, are meeting this week. Dr. Robert Hill, chair of the Advisory Committee on the African American Population, will summarize highlights of the REAC meetings at the DCAC meeting next week. Census News Briefs are prepared by Terri Ann Lowenthal, an independent consultant in Washington, DC. Please direct questions about the information in this News Brief to Ms. Lowenthal at 202/484-3067 or by e-mail at <mailto:TerriAnn2K@aol.com>TerriAnn2K@aol.com. Please feel free to circulate this document to other interested individuals and organizations. The Communications Consortium Media Center (CCMC) has posted News Briefs through April 2003 on the Census 2000 Initiative web site, at <http://www.census2000.org/>www.census2000.org. If you would like copies of Census News Briefs distributed after April 2003, please contact Ms. Lowenthal directly.