CENSUS NUMBERS MAY STILL CHANGE

The books apparently are yet to close on the final 1990 Cape Girardeau census count, but city officials said any adjustment to the U.S. Census Bureau's January figure likely will be slight.

Melvin Gateley, Cape Girardeau's liaison with the Census Bureau, said the city was informed this month that the bureau discovered an error in its record of the city's legal boundary and planned to adjust its report.

"Their review found an error in a portion of the legal boundary of Cape Girardeau," Gateley said. "Part of the city wasn't included in their map, and they didn't say what area was in error."

Gateley said he didn't know how much, if at all, the boundary discrepancy would affect the city's population count. He also said there's little chance it would relate to the city's contention that the bureau missed about 500 housing units in last year's census effort.

Final census figures in January put Cape Girardeau's population at 34,438, up 77 from the 1980 figure and 271 from last summer's preliminary count.

But city officials claim the bureau failed to count nearly 500 housing units in the city, based on city records. The number of housing units is an important factor to determine the accuracy of the census' population counts, because if housing units aren't accounted for, it's likely their occupants also weren't counted, city officials said.

If the Census Bureau agrees to adjust Cape Girardeau's population based on the changed legal boundary, it likely would be a minor increase, Gateley said.

"I'm pretty sure it's going to be of little significance as far as the population count goes," he said. "I keep writing back to them, and point out that since they did find the one error on the boundary things, there might be another error on our housing count.

"I still think there's almost 500 housing units that they missed on our census."

Gateley said the only boundary changes that have been made since the last census in 1980 resulted from property being annexed. But he said those areas wouldn't account for the undercount in housing units.

"They said in their letter that they would revise their records to reflect the legal boundary and will incorporate any adjustments to the population count," he said. "They will issue a revised certified census count sometime before the end of the summer."

In a letter to Gateley, Edwin B. Wagner Jr., the Census Bureau's assistant division chief for operations, said the bureau would revise the "geographic assignment of any living quarters and associated population affected by this boundary change.

"The Census Bureau will incorporate these corrections into our Population Estimates Program." But the corrections would not be added to the final census counts issued in January and used in legislative apportionment and redistricting.

On July 15, U.S. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher overruled a recommendation of the director of the Census Bureau and decided not to adjust the 1990 census that reportedly missed more than 5 million people nationwide.

Barbara Bryant, director of the Census Bureau, had recommended Mosbacher agree to a statistical adjustment to the census to make the count more accurate. Bryant said there are really between 253 million and 254 million people in the United States, not the 248.7 million the official census will show.

Mosbacher and the Commerce Department are being sued by a number of cities to force an adjustment. At stake is the composition of the House of Representatives, the legislatures of the 50 states and the distribution of nearly $60 billion in federal money that flows to states and cities based on population formulas.

If errors are found in individual cities' counts, corrections would be shown on a "supplemental user note" to be issued later this summer.

Gateley said the decision not to statistically adjust the count likely has little impact on Cape Girardeau.

"That's not really going to affect the counts within municipalities anyway," Gateley said. "As a result of that decision, the January 1991 numbers will remain the official count."