By The Editors

Officials of a non-partisan coalition of organizations based in New York City are warning that the city could lose millions of dollars in federal funds if residents in neighborhoods with a low participation rate—which is based on the number of residents returning the Census form—are not included in the Census count.

Those officials said that as of this week the participation rate in certain Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens Census tracts was far below the national average of 60 percent. They said that the current participation rates in neighborhoods they characterize as “hard to count” range from 30 to 50 percent.

For example, the officials said that more than 80 percent of such neighborhoods in the city boroughs of The Bronx and Queens have participation rates below 50 percent. In Brooklyn 95 percent of such neighborhoods have participation rates below 50 percent.

If such low participation rates persist, an undercount could result, the officials said, and New York City could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. Jackson Chin, Associate Counsel, of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, one of the organizations in the coalition, the New York Voting Rights Consortium, said that due to the city’s 55-percent participation rate in the 2000 Census, it lost out on $847 million in federal aid.

By the federal formula used to calculate aid to communities based on population, each person omitted from the Census who resided in areas with the largest undercount during the 2000 Census “cost” his or her community about $2,913 in much needed federal aid. The consortium urged that it did not want to siphon similar resources out of the communities with the greatest need because of an undercount in 2010.

Chin, speaking at the coalition’s news conference today in Manhattan, said that federal aid is used to fund many programs especially important to low-income families and communities – programs such as Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, school lunch programs and Head Start.

That’s why, said Jenigh Garrett, Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Political Participation Group, it’s “critical that people who have yet to return their Census forms do so.”

Referring to the nation’s economic crisis, Garrett added that the “depressed participation rate in hard to count areas harms all New Yorkers, but the impact in communities of color, and black communities particularly, is concentrated and compounded by other economic problems.”

Hard to count areas are generally those with a high percentage of people of color, a high number of immigrants, and a high number of people with low incomes.

Joan Gibbs, General Counsel of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, said that many in these groups have for various reasons a deep aversion to government officials.

To counter that in central Brooklyn, where the college is located, Gibbs said they are posting ads urging that residents return the Census forms on nearly three dozen billboards in the area and sending a legion of the college’s students on a door-to-door canvassing campaign in advance of the April 15 deadline.

The other organizations in the coalition are: the Asian-American Legal Defense & Education Fund, the Community Service Society, and the National Institute of Latino Policy.

All these organizations are veterans of efforts to improve the Census count of Americans of color. They were among the most outspoken in pointing out that in 2000 the Census missed an estimated 1 million people of color across the country – over 600,000 of whom were African Americans.

Angelo Falcón, President of the National Institute of Latino Policy, said that the current effort has done some things better – including making better use of the internet and other non-traditional outlets to alert citizens to the importance of the Census.

He also said he believes, despite the low participation rate in some areas, the overall response from hard to count communities is better at this stage than during the 2000 Census. “But we can’t let up,” he added. “We can’t let the fact that these are poor communities allow history to repeat itself, allow them to be undercounted again. We’ve got to intensify our efforts in the days that remain.”

Glenn Magpantay, Director of the Democracy Program for the Asian-American Legal Defense & Education Fund, said that producing an accurate Census count is also a civil rights issue. He said that the greater the federal aid to poor communities and communities of color, the greater the chance their residents will be able to protect and take advantage of more of their rights as American citizens.

The NYVRC is a non-partisan coalition of national and local organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, the Center for Law & Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, the Community Service Society of New York, the National Institute for Latino Policy, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF. The New York Voting Rights Consortium is committed to the full enforcement of federal and state laws that protect the voting rights of minorities.