In a move that shows signs of salvaging Chicago’s census campaign, Mayor Richard Daley has shuffled City Hall’s census leadership for the remaining month of the door-to-door count, city officials said Tuesday.
In the past 10 days, Daley has added five staffers to coordinate the city’s census promotion efforts and has shifted greater daily control to a top deputy of chief of staff Julia Stasch.
Don Davis, whom Daley tapped two years ago to run the census efforts, said he remains part of the effort, while deputy chief of staff Sarah Pang has taken on “more day-to-day involvement now.”
“We take direction from Sarah,” said David Bayless, the city’s newly dubbed census spokesman and one of the five recently added staffers. “Don is certainly our expert on this, so we go to him for a lot of information.”
The management changes came amid mounting pressure from minority advocates in recent weeks who have blasted the city’s promotion campaign as unsubstantial and uncreative.
Mayoral spokesman Rod Sierra said the new staffing arrangement and other emergency measures are “designed to lend some urgency to this.”
“I think people react to some urgency once in a while,” he said.
Census Bureau officials credit the management changes, combined with $400,000 in new advertising, for invigorating Chicago’s census operations in the past two weeks.
The surge has brought the city’s regional office ahead of offices in New York City, Boston and Charlotte in total households contacted successfully.
In the door-knocking phase, Chicago has even surged ahead of where it was in 1990, leaving fewer than 120,000 housing units left to be contacted in the next 30 days. As of June 1, 70.4 percent of households that failed to return a questionnaire had been counted in person or over the telephone, compared with 68.1 percent for the same time a decade ago.
The U.S. Census Bureau had been prepared to extend Chicago’s door-to-door operations past July 7–the original deadline. But the recent improvement suggests that may not be necessary, said national census spokesman Steve Jost.
One spark beneath the recent improvement has been the use of city precinct workers to prime neighborhoods in advance of census takers. City officials say that until this week, the bureau had resisted offers to tap Chicago’s well-oiled ward operations to help open doors.
“We urged all the aldermen to use whatever resources they have. Their people know the neighborhoods,” Sierra said. “We know some of them have done it, certainly.”
Another 150 volunteers from city agencies were enlisted to knock on doors citywide last weekend, Sierra said.
City and census officials also met this week with the managers of several lakefront high-rises to plead for cooperation after weeks of frustration over doormen who were turning away census takers. Figures show improved response in those areas in recent days.
The reorganization of the city’s census campaign also comes amid growing friction between City Hall and the bureau, which is ultimately directed by the mayor’s brother U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley.
mayor is scheduled to meet Wednesday with national census director Kenneth Prewitt in Chicago. The two will discuss remaining operations.
