Census to be done with paper, pencil

The computers were too complex for some workers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Stumbling over its multibillion-dollar plans for a high-tech census, the government says it will go back to counting the nation’s 300 million people the old-fashioned way — with paper and pencil.

Help wanted: 600,000 temporary workers to do the job.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress on Thursday his department will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don’t return the census forms that come in the mail.

That’s one of a number of changes that will add as much as $3 billion to the constitutionally mandated 2010 count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.

This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation’s history. The Census Bureau had awarded a contract to purchase 500,000 of the computers, at a cost of more than $600 million. The devices, which look like fancy cell phones, will still be used to verify every residential street address in the country, using global positioning system software.

But workers going door-to-door will not be able to use them to collect information from the residents who didn’t return their census forms. About a third of U.S. residents are expected not to return the forms.

The Census Bureau plans to hire and train nearly 600,000 temporary workers to do the canvassing.

Interviews, congressional testimony and government reports describe an agency that was unprepared to manage the contract for the handheld computers. Census officials are being blamed for doing a poor job of spelling out technical requirements to the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp.

The computers proved too complex for some temporary workers who tried to use them in a test last year in North Carolina. Also, the computers were not initially programmed to transmit the large amounts of data necessary.

Gutierrez, who oversees the Census Bureau, said officials there were unaccustomed to working with an outside vendor on such a large contract.

The 2010 census was already on pace to be the most expensive ever. Officials now are scrambling to hold down costs while trying to ensure the count produces reliable population numbers — figures that will be used to apportion seats in Congress and divvy up more than $300 billion a year in federal and state funding.

Harris Corp. was awarded a $596 million contract in March 2006 to supply the handheld computers and the operating system that supports them. The contract has since grown to $647 million.