City census in ‘sheer chaos’
High turnover, filthy offices plague tally as deadline nears
An accurate census in New York City? It’s tough to count on. Workers involved in the last-minute push to tally people in the five boroughs described a chaotic effort managed from dirty offices with lax coronavirus protocols.
The constitutionally mandated census, conducted every 10 years, faces an early deadline of Sept. 30 thanks to a last-minute shift by President Trump’s administration. Several workers told the Daily News last week it seemed impossible to meet their goals.
“The sense I have is that the people who are supposedly running this show at the local levels — it is sheer chaos. There are very few people who have done this before,” a worker in a supervisory role at an office on Myrtle Ave. in Brooklyn told The News.
The supervisor said the attrition rate of workers quitting the job is extraordinary. The supervisor said enumerators — the on-the-ground workers going door to door — were contacted after quitting to confirm they’d returned equipment used to record New Yorkers’ information. The former employees laughed and wondered why the Census Bureau wasn’t keeping track of the gear, which the bureau says is automatically wiped each day.
“I really believe — I don’t know how to prove this — I believe that the data that’s being collected can’t be reliable. There’s so much turnover in the workforce. How do they even get up to speed?” the supervisor said.
An employee on his first day on the job, John, said his start was delayed by five months because training was overhauled to be done remotely due to the pandemic. He had 144 addresses to hit in one day, which he said was impossible.
“I really can’t possibly do that, because that would be like 16 hours [even] if I was just doing a 10-minute [visit] each time,” John, 33, said outside an office on St. Marks Ave. in Brownsville.
Jeff Behler, the regional director for the Census Bureau, said the count was more efficient than ever and that he is “absolutely confident that it will get done on time.” The census determines how many electoral votes and congressional representatives each state receives.
Still, he declined to share information about the number of employees quitting or data specific to the city. He said that comparing current data with previous censuses was like “apples to oranges”
because the 2010 count was mostly done on paper.
As of Thursday, 94% of New York State had been accounted for, according to Behler.
Julie Menin, City Hall’s census director, said the city’s self-response rate was nearly the same as in 2010, in part thanks to extensive outreach coordinated by Mayor de Blasio’s administration. She credited local Census Bureau administrators as nonpartisan public servants, but said meddling from the nation’s capital took a toll. The new deadline, she said, was “nefarious.” Hiring of enumerators had slowed at the start of the pandemic.
“Just looking at it, it seemed there was a slowdown, if you will, on hiring and putting the teams into place,” Menin said.
“I have to think some of this was coming directly from Washington.”
She cited Trump’s failed attempt to add a question about citizenship status to the census, as well as his ongoing effort to omit undocumented immigrants from the count.
“When you have the president and (Commerce Secretary) Wilbur Ross trying to interfere, that certainly has a trickle-down effect,” Menin said.
Some 1.4 million households in the city have not self-responded, she said.
Census workers who spoke to The News griped about the bureau’s offices, as well. A worker at the Myrtle Ave. location complained that no one took coronavirus protocols seriously in his open-space office of around 25 people.
The worker, who wished to be anonymous due to the risk he’d lose his job, said a lack of masks had him “fearing for his safety.”
“We are supposed to have partitions up between us, but people push them down,” he said.
“The funny thing about masks is that they don’t really help you, they help the people around you. So to feel like the people around you, for their own comfort, don’t care about the people around them ... well, that’s the thing.”
The supervisor at the same location had similar complaints about a lack of masks — and added that the office is filthy.
“It’s a f--king pit. It’s disgusting. No one should have to work in an office like this. There are flies buzzing around the garbage cans,” the supervisor said.
“The bathroom wasn’t cleaned for 12 days.”
Behler said offices should be cleaned daily and that employees unable to socially distance must wear masks.