Census reports face challenges

By Richard Higgins

Globe Staff

Arguing that many of their residents had been missed, four mostly rural western Massachusetts communities are challenging the 2000 Census.

Officials in Northampton, Gill, Leverett, and West Stockbridge said they plan to file a formal challenge when the US Census Bureau opens the 90-day “Count Question Resolution Program” process on June 30.

At that time, the Census will release its community demographic profiles, including maps of residences used in the counting, allowing towns to check them against their own records, according to Ralph Rinaldi, regional manager of the program.

Other rural towns that were told that they had shrunk, including Deerfield, said they were considering an appeal.

Almost an the communities say that their own street lists, maintained by town clerks, voting officials and firefighters, showed significantly more people than the figures given in the federal tallies last month.

And the stakes are high, because state aid is doled out by formulas according to population.

'This number is considerably lower than what we got in our own census,

and ifs one we don't want to live with," said Pat Shaughnessy, Northampton city clerk. The Census Bureau said Northampton lost 311 residents from 1990 to 2000. leaving it at 28,978 residents, about 1,800 fewer than 1980.

The appeal process doesn’t look easy, with all the documentation they want, but I think we have to try," she said-

Many town officials said the problems revolved around The stakes are the use of postal boxes, a common " practice in rural areas.

"We're pretty sure doledoilt peop^sai^Tis^ aCCOrdingtO Se^lon P°P^On. had 1,785 residents in 1990.

She said town records show that Leverett had grown to 2,055 residents by last year. The Census Bureau said the town is population declined by 122 people.

Despite its small size, Leverett, which is just north of Amherst, has four zip codes, a holdover from the days when it was easier for postal workers in neighboring towns to deliver the mail "because they were going to be on a certain road on that end of town," Stratford said.

The result is that 219 Leverett residents have zip codes that officially belong to Montague, Amherst, or Shutesbury.

However, when the census forms were mailed to Leverett, postal workers were instructed to mail back any forms that had zip codes other than Leverett’s.

“The Census Bureau was supposed to find workers to go door to door in those cases, but that never happened,” she said. “I have people who have called me or come

into my office and who say they never got a form and were never visited.”

Census officials confirmed that their policy was not to deliver to post office boxes, but they said that they had not counted every-one.

"Our address lists were coded by geographical location only," said Mark Tolbert, a spokesman for the US Census Bureau at its national headquarters in Maryland. "If an address was given as a post office box, we would determine what the physical address was," then a Census official "would go there and knock on the door to get the information."

In Monroe, which slipped in the latest census to 93 residents from 115 in 1990, there was consternation but no plan to appeal. "I was surprised that it was only 93 and think the real number is something like 100, but ifs not enough of a difference to make a stink about," said me town clerk, MaiceDaGore.

Officials in Gill were taking a more activist approach to solving what Ann Banash, the chairwoman of the Board of Selectmen, called "the mystery of the incredible shrinking town."

Gill suffered a big decline in the latest Census figures, from 1,583 residents in 1990 to 1,363 residents last year, for a loss of almost 14 percent.

But with the town issuing a stream of new building permits and with existing homes hard to buy because the inventory is low and prices are high, everyone in Gill is.