California is responding in force to the 2020 census. But these rural areas are way behind
Stuck at home and glued to the internet, Californians are responding in large numbers to the 2020 census questionnaire so far, placing the state at about the same participation rate as a decade ago.
Now comes the hard part — finding the people who haven’t responded to the online survey, don’t get mail at home, and who may need a special visit from the U.S. Census Bureau.
That includes rural pockets of the state, where responses to the survey are lagging.
In the tiny Delta town of Isleton, for example, nearly 12 percent of residents have responded; in Colfax in the Sierra foothills only 34 percent answered; and in South Lake Tahoe, where nearly 22,000 people live and many Californians own second homes, only 25 percent have answered.
As of Wednesday, California remained near the middle of the pack compared to other states with a response rate of 58 percent. The state was 10 percentage points away from reaching the goal set during the last self-response period in 2010.
As states begin easing stay-at-home orders, the Census Bureau is reopening some offices across the country, although none yet in none California. The next phases, which require home visits, are largely left to the federal government.
They will first try to reach the communities where more than half of the residents do not receive mail at home and instead rely on P.O. boxes. (The Census Bureau does not send questionnaires to P.O. boxes.) That includes several rural parts of California such as Colfax, North Auburn, Isleton and communities around Lake Tahoe, among others.
During the next phase known as “update leave,” federal census workers go door-to-door and leave behind an invitation to respond. It was supposed to start in March until the pandemic crippled the plan. This week, the Census Bureau said only a dozen states would start sending workers out.
“The fact that Isleton has any responses at all is pretty good given most of the folks down there haven’t received a census questionnaire yet,” said Judy Robinson, who helps oversee outreach for Sacramento County.
Overall, Placer County’s response rate is above the state average except in the rural eastern part of the county.
Nikki Streegan, a senior planner for Placer County, said areas like Kings Beach is one of the county’s top concerns because its residents are more likely to be transient or often work in the service industry for part of the year.
Like other organizations, Placer County has shifted to phone banking when canvassing in person became too unsafe. All of that came to a halt in March. Streegan said the next phase will have a greater effect on response rates in the outlying places.
“That’s the biggest reason why you don’t see good response rates in the eastern part of the county,” she said. “To some extent, rural areas, in general, are more difficult to count. They may have broadband issues or no access to broadband (internet). Our strategy from the get-go has been to focus outreach on those places.”
A lot more work ahead
An army of nonprofits across the state is trying to revive their outreach efforts after the COVID-19 pandemic derailed strategies formed months or even years ago. The early results, in some cases, highlight how much further they have to go.
The El Dorado Community Foundation, one of the lead organizations for the county, had plans for outreach that would have lasted the duration of the census. The Placerville-based organization is now trying to figure out how to “re-engage” the community, said Bill Roby, the nonprofit’s executive director.
“Unfortunately with sheltering in place and all the unemployment that happened with all the casinos and hotel workers, the individuals that we were trying to get to fill out the census became more afraid,” Roby said.
A little more than a quarter of the city’s 22,000 residents are Hispanic, census data shows. Two census tracts in South Lake Tahoe where the majority of people are are Hispanic, monolingual and also non-citizens was one of their chief concerns, he said.
“It becomes even harder to reach them because you can’t have that personal interface,” Roby said. “We had built up a whole network of trust and when you’re not able to execute on that trust it makes it more difficult.”
The threat of COVID-19 is only the latest potential setback. Until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down, the federal government planned to add a citizenship question on the form, which had never been done before, and studies showed it would have undermined the count.
Federal funding for the census was also lower than in previous years. So some states, like California, funded massive outreach campaigns to ensure none of the federal actions by the Donald Trump Administration, whose policies are more hostile to immigrants, could weaken the survey of residents.
The consequence could be less federal funding for the state or in a drastic case less representation in Congress. California has stated plans to spend as much as $187 million on advertisements and grant funding that’s filtered down to small nonprofits that work in difficult to reach communities.
“We can debate the motivations. But the bottom line is we were successful through litigation in ensuring that nobody’s citizenship is questioned through the census because the census is for everybody,” state Secretary of State Alex Padilla said during an outreach webinar live-streamed on Facebook this week.
“For all that we’ve been through in the last three to four years...this is the time to tell people to be welcoming of that outreach from federal representatives because we need you to be counted.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.