MI: Census mail skips mayor, longtime residents

Monday, April 3, 2000

By John S. Hausman CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER

Transients, the homeless, "snowbirds": Such people notoriously pose a challenge for the Census Bureau.

It's harder to explain how a census mailing can miss the mayor and city manager of the same small town - both of them year-round solid citizens who haven't moved in more than a decade.

That's what happened in Whitehall, a city of 3,000 in northern Muskegon County. (Well, at least it was a city of 3,000 in 1990. Its current population is being determined right now. Presumably.)

Whitehall Mayor Norman Ullman and City Manager Gerald M. Homminga each got the precensus postcard in early March, alerting them that they would get their census forms in the mail the following week.

But they never got the form itself.

Neither, apparently, did a fairly large number of other Whitehall households.

As best as anyone can determine, census questionnaires mailed to the homes of Ullman, Homminga and many other residents were misaddressed. Therefore, the U.S. Postal Service returned them to the Muskegon census office as "undeliverable."

"I've lived in this house for 25 or 26 years," Ullman said. "Is this typical?"

Homminga said he called the census bureau and said, "I've lived here for 12 years. You got me in the last census. You should be able to get me in this one."

Whitehall Postmaster Rocky Freed estimated Friday that his branch returned some 100 forms because they were misaddressed. He said the Grand Rapids regional post office may have sent back more.

Muskegon census office manager Debi Zant has no statistics on Whitehall in particular or on the number of census forms that were misaddressed throughout her eight-county region.

Regionwide, she said, about 12,500 mailed forms were returned to her office as "undeliverable," nearly 7 percent of those mailed. But not all were misaddressed. In some cases, the intended recipient had moved; in others, the usual resident was living at a winter address at the time of the mid-March mailing.

Certain towns seemed to have more problems than others, Zant said. Whitehall and Grand Haven were among them, she said. Both cities had an unusually large number of forms bounced back as undeliverable.

The mailing mishap doesn't mean the missed residents won't be counted. Census officials say the households should be reached by Friday with forms delivered to their doors. Any who still get missed, or who don't respond, are supposed to be contacted face-to-face late this month by "nonresponse" census-takers.

The missed city leaders hope that happens.

Local officials are especially sensitive to the need for an accurate count: They know much rides on counting every possible resident.

"I want everyone in this town counted," Ullman said. "It's the basis of political power as well as funding."

http://aa.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/20000403mnoform238.frm

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), April 03, 2000