West Sonoma County sees lowest census participation as count comes to a close

The 2020 census wrapped up Thursday, and though Sonoma County as a whole showed a higher self-response rate than 10 years ago, low participation in the west county will likely affect federal funding for education and health care in communities recovering from calamities such as wildfires and flooding.

“That’s a real problem,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, whose Northern California congressional district stretches along the coast from the San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border. He said numbers in his district showed higher turnout in more affluent areas, while communities considered “hard to count” remained low, despite volunteer efforts.

“As you know, certain federal benefits are allocated according to formulas based on census data,” Huffman said. “What you don’t want to see is the rich get richer and these under-resourced communities do not get their fair share.”

While Sonoma County’s 70.3% self-response rate Thursday (which captures all responses registered via phone, mail or online) surpassed its 2010 rate of 68.6%, as well as the state’s current rate of 69.4%, self-response varied by a wide margin across census tracts within the county.

The tract encompassing Bodega Bay, Jenner and Highway 116 between Cazadero Highway and the coast, had the lowest participation rate in Sonoma County: 33.4%, nearly 10 percentage points lower than participation a decade ago.

The areas in west county with participation in the 30%-50% range included those where people were evacuated during the Walbridge fire, which may have had a negative impact on the count.

“I don’t know exactly how that translated to census participation,” Huffman said. “But it certainly didn’t help.”

Though the Oct. 15 deadline wasn’t as early of a cutoff to collect census responses as the Trump administration initially tried to enforce, Thursday was still an earlier deadline than census workers and community partners had originally anticipated. The census had initially been scheduled to end Oct. 31.

Angie Sanchez, head of programs at Corazón Healdsburg, rues the loss of two additional weeks to reach out to more people in north Sonoma County.

“We had an outreach plan for the rest of the month,” she said. “We were going into some of those other neighborhoods that we haven't been able to. It’s really unfair to the people, the community and organizations that they have decided again to change the deadlines.”

In August, the Trump administration sought to end the census count early, on Sept. 30, arguing that it was necessary in order to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to begin working to reapportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Bureau officials have said since May that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that deadline would be impossible to meet, and Congress has in the past moved to extend the timeline if needed in order to bolster the accuracy of the count.

A federal appeals court judge blocked that move in September, allowing the census count to continue through Oct. 31. The Trump administration then appealed, and the Supreme Court overturned the federal judge’s ruling Tuesday.

The shortened timelines added pressure in a year when, even before wildfires broke out in Sonoma County, the COVID-19 pandemic had already created significant challenges to the effort to achieve a complete count.

Nicollette Weinzveg, community impact director with United Way of the Wine Country, said that her organization administered grant money in seven counties to community organizations such as Corazón Healdsburg to fund education and outreach.

“Those organizations had so many wonderful things planned,” she said. “That was brought to a screeching halt in the middle of March.”

That doesn’t mean that organizations gave up, however. Many pivoted to other methods. Corazón Healdsburg offers several examples.

Sanchez noted the significance of her organization’s deep inroads with immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities that existed before they began pushing out information about the census. She brainstormed a variety of socially distanced outreach efforts and made sure people became aware that Corazón Healdsburg staff were available to answer questions and even help households fill out the paperwork or online form.

They also put a census spin on traditions that would be recognizable and approachable for the families they were trying to attract, Sanchez said. They held virtual game nights inviting people to play a version of lotería that Sanchez had created, called “Censotería.”

“We started getting creative on how we were going to reach out to the community,” she said.

Another time, they hired a local paletero man and walked through neighborhoods, calling out to families and offering frozen treats in exchange for participating in the count.

“They feel like, ‘We can come out, we trust you,’ ” Sanchez said. “We’re coming with music they recognize and paletas and speaking Spanish. It’s very different.”

Seeing the impact of their outreach only strengthened her belief that every day she and her team could have spent visiting more neighborhoods would have made a difference. And as the count comes to a close, she can’t downplay those losses, because she has been telling people for months the long-term budgetary impacts of every person who goes uncounted.

“We’re living in the moment of COVID-19, but we also have to think,” Sanchez said. “The effect of not being counted in the census is for the next decade."

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