L.A. Will Seek to Reopen Suit Over Census : Undercounting: A federal judge will be asked to hold the Commerce Department in contempt of a court-approved settlement to ensure the accurate counting of minorities, immigrants and the poor.

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn announced Tuesday that the city will ask a federal judge to hold the U.S. Department of Commerce in contempt of a court-approved settlement seeking to ensure that minorities, immigrants and poor people are accurately counted during the 1990 Census that begins this month.

Hahn asserted that the controversy over census procedures “has become the biggest civil rights issue facing the nation today.�

Hahn’s action would reopen a 1988 lawsuit that charged the Commerce Department with illegally rejecting a technique that would lead to a more complete count of the people, mainly city dwellers, who traditionally are undercounted.

The suit was filed jointly by several cities, including Los Angeles and New York, which stand to lose millions of dollars in federal aid based on population, as well as political representation, as a result of an undercount. A settlement of the suit was reached last summer when the Commerce Department agreed to reconsider the disputed technique and also agreed to set forth certain guidelines under which it might be used.

Hahn is now accusing the Commerce Department of issuing a set of guidelines that all but doom the controversial technique.

“The Commerce Department is guilty at best of bad faith,� Hahn said, “and at worst of engaging in an active conspiracy to manipulate the census in order to undercount minorities and people living in poverty.�

According to Hahn’s office, New York will join in renewing the lawsuit.

Officials of the Commerce Department could not be reached for comment.

Whatever happens in the case, officials of the U.S. Census Bureau have indicated that the census will proceed on schedule with most American households starting to receive census forms during the last week of March and census takers following up on the mailing with visits to homes that do not return the forms.

It is that approach, however, that plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue leads to undercounting the urban poor.

Hahn’s office contends that the 1980 Census, while undercounting only 1.4% of the nation’s population, missed more than 9% of blacks in Los Angeles, nearly 10% of the city’s Latino population and more than 7% of Asian-Americans.

The city attorney said the undercount would shortchange the city by close to $150 million over the next decade. Much of that money, Hahn’s office said, would go to housing and social service programs for the urban poor.

From the beginning of the lawsuit, the plaintiffs have argued that the Commerce Department’s action was politically inspired--an attempt by a Republican Administration to cheat Democratically dominated cities of the money and increased political power that normally accrue to growing population centers.

The technique, known as the post-enumeration survey, at issue in the lawsuit would offer a means of checking the accuracy of the census. Census takers would go back to 150,000 households, representing a broad spectrum of society, and compare what they found then with the initial head count.

Where discrepancies surfaced, the Census Bureau would determine which of the two counts was accurate and a correction would be made. The corrections would be projected to neighborhoods with similar characteristics and become the basis for adjusting the nationwide census.