Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990                   TAG: 9004010093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HIGHER STAKES MAY ALTER CENSUS METHOD

California wants to know if it gained six congressional seats or seven; Pennsylvania wants to know if it lost two or three. New Jersey towns want local population figures to know how many liquor licenses they can issue. Oklahoma City, Okla., and Rochester, N.Y., want to know if they have lost their places among the top 50 metropolitan markets, meaning millions of advertising dollars would go elsewhere.

As the winners and losers have increased, so have the legal and political pressures on the Bureau of the Census, the agency that keeps the score. It has forced politicians, the bureau and professional statisticians around the country to reexamine basic questions:

What demographic information should the government gather? How should it be gathered? And to what end?

Census figures have always been the basis of congressional reapportionment, but not until the 1970 census was it required by the U.S. Supreme Court that the numbers be used for redrawing legislative districts in the states.

By 1980, as federal revenue-sharing programs based on population grew, census figures were used to apportion large amounts of money as well as power - more than $40 billion a year in federal money in the 1980s.

Rep. Thomas C. Sawyer, D-Ohio, chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Census Bureau, said the pressure from this scrutiny may alter the way the census counts people.

"We're undergoing a simultaneous economic, demographic and technological change that is shaping issues more directly than at any time in the past 100 years," he said.

"As a result, the character of the census may not change. But the methodology may change radically."