LIers keep pace with nation on returning census

Sixty-one percent of Long Island households had mailed back their census forms by Wednesday afternoon - close to the 63 percent national rate - but some communities considered "hard to count" still lag behind.

In Hempstead Village, for example, the mail-back rate ranged from 40 percent to 59 percent, varying among the multiple census tracts within the village.

In an effort to boost what it calls the "mail participation rate," the U.S. Census Bureau has begun mailing out a second round of census forms to about 40 million housing units in areas with below-average participation rates in the 2000 Census.

"We estimate that the second mailing could increase America's mail participation rate in the 2010 Census by 7 to 10 percentage points, and doing so would save taxpayers more than $500 million," Census Bureau director Robert Groves said in a statement Wednesday.

Groves said higher census mail-in rates mean fewer census workers have to be dispatched to interview residents who don't return the form.

On Long Island, census officials and myriad civic groups and government officials have been promoting census awareness.

They've focused on many minority communities considered hard to count for a variety of reasons, such as suspicion about a government agency and unfounded fears about the census.

In Wyandanch, among communities targeted for census outreach, the mail participation rate ranged from 33 percent to 45 percent as of Wednesday.

Nancy Holliday, a community activist and trustee of the Wyandanch Public Library, said a lot of "positive outreach" had occurred. "We've got to reach out and make sure people in my community understand" the census' importance, Holliday said.

The library serves as a census Questionnaire Assistance Center staffed by census workers for three hours on Wednesdays.

Richard Ashby Jr., chief librarian and program director, said about 10 to 20 residents typically visited each week to talk to census workers.

The library has acted as a test site for the bureau, employing door-to-door census workers.

Ashby said he hoped Wyandanch residents were "represented strongly" among the bureau's workers for the door-to-door phase starting in May.

"That's one of the reasons we're hosting them, so our community can get hired," he said.