Much at stake, Hub sharpens focus on census

Brushing past balloons and a big red ribbon at a ceremony celebrating a new census office in Roxbury, he told census officials he has challenged their last four annual estimates and will be carefully monitoring how well they do at finding hard-to-count residents of the city in the 2010 Census.

“I wasn’t happy with the last census,’’ he said, dispensing with niceties as he took the podium and spoke to a clutch of census workers. “As a matter of fact, we sued you. And we won!’’

Menino, who was reelected to an unprecedented fifth term Tuesday, urged the census workers to follow the example of his vaunted political machine, which is known for its street-level knowledge of the city’s diverse precincts.

“It’s just like our campaign,’’ the mayor said. “Identify the people and go after them.’’

Census officials said it is not unusual for mayors of major cities to challenge their counts, and they downplayed any friction with Menino.

“It’s a tough job, and we have to work together,’’ Arnold Jackson, associate director of the census, said after the ribbon-cutting for the agency’s new office at Roxbury Community College.

Boston has long presented challenges for census takers. The high number of college students, who tend to move frequently, is difficult to measure. There is a significant number of illegal immigrants, who often shy away from federal paperwork, even though federal officials say census information is not used for any other purposes. And Jackson said his agency faces a new challenge: locating people who have been evicted or whose homes have been foreclosed, during the recession.

US Senator John F. Kerry, concerned about the local count, has been meeting with leaders from minority and immigrant communities to try to boost participation.

“Massachusetts runs the risk of losing out on federal funding, critical services, and possibly even a vote in the House of Representatives if we fail to count everyone,’’ Brigid O’Rourke, a Kerry spokeswoman, said in a statement yesterday.

City officials said each person counted by the census generates about $1,200 in federal funding for Boston. The city uses the federal money to pay for such programs as school lunches, medical care for the poor at institutions including Boston Medical Center, and the weatherization of public housing complexes.

The count could also affect whether Massachusetts loses one of its 10 congressional seats as a result of a long-term population shift from the Northeast to the South and West.

Census officials said they will mount an advertising campaign in 28 languages next month to encourage residents to return the 10-question form that will be mailed out in March. Federal officials are hoping to increase the rate of Boston residents who mail back the questionnaire, from 57 percent in 2000 to at least 70 percent next year. The nationwide rate in 2000 was 67 percent.

Census officials are also distributing lessons about the count to schools and are enlisting local nonprofit groups to spread the word about the count in ethnic and minority communities. At the Fields Corner MBTA Station in Dorchester, a new census-sponsored mural depicts colorful hands interwoven with the message “Everyone Counts’’ in five languages: English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Cape Verdean Creole.

Boston’s population has inched upward in recent years. The most recent census estimate, in July, put Boston’s population at 609,023, although the city has challenged that figure, contending the estimate should be 630,384.

Last year, the city’s challenge prompted the Census Bureau to revise its estimate of Boston’s population in 2007 from 599,351 to 608,352, pushing it above 600,000 for the first time since the 1970s.

In the 1990s, the Census Bureau routinely estimated that Boston was losing population, only to determine in the decennial count, in 2000, that the city’s population had increased during the decade.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.