A public hearing for the county board of supervisors’ redistricting efforts is set for Tuesday, Sept. 28. Community members are invited to attend and provide feedback on the process.

The 2020 U. S. Census data released last month revealed that Riverside County has grown by more than 10 percent – more than double the growth of neighboring counties in Southern California. Following this data, the County of Riverside is charged with redistricting the county’s supervisorial district boundaries.

Redistricting ensures fair and equal representation accounting for changes in population and communities of interest that share common social and economic factors. Public participation in the redistricting process is a critically important part of the process.

“The voice of our residents is crucial during this process as the work of the county impacts and enhances their daily lives,” said Board Chair Karen Spiegel, second district supervisor. “Residents are encouraged to share their feedback in-person or online.”

Residents are invited to attend the regularly scheduled board of supervisors meeting on Tuesday (Sept. 28) at 9:30 a.m. to provide input in-person on the redistricting efforts, as well as suggested boundary lines. The public hearing will be held during the regularly scheduled board meeting. The time of the public hearing is subject change based on the board meeting agenda.

Community members may draw suggested boundary lines and submit online using the online feedback tool. Find more information online at RivCo.org, under Redistricting.

The public hearing will also be available live or on-demand at RivCoTV.org.

Additional opportunities for public input will be held in Oct. and Nov., including another public hearing slated for Oct. 19.

rivco.org | Contributed

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Massive government relief passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic moved millions of Americans out of poverty last year, even as the official poverty rate increased slightly, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

The official poverty measure rose 1 percentage point in 2020, with 11.4% of Americans living in poverty, or more than 37 million people. It was the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines.

But the Census Bureau’s supplemental measure of poverty, which takes into account government benefit programs and stimulus payments, showed that the share of people in poverty dropped significantly after the aid was factored in.

The supplemental poverty measure was 2.6 percentage points lower than its pre-pandemic level in 2019. Stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty, while expanded unemployment benefits kept 5.5 million from falling into poverty. Social Security continued to be the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program.

“This really highlights the importance of our social safety net,” said Liana Fox, chief of the Census’ poverty statistics bureau.

That finding is likely to resonate in a divided Congress, where President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” domestic agenda faces uncertain prospects. Two anchors of last year’s COVID response — enhanced unemployment benefits and a federal eviction moratorium — have expired, adding to concerns.

The White House quickly took note.

“The key takeaway from this report is the extremely powerful anti-poverty and pro-middle class income impacts of the government response in 2020,” said spokeswoman Emilie Simons. “It isn’t enough to temporarily lift people out of poverty, we need to provide opportunities for working Americans and their families to stay there.”

The Census reports released Tuesday cover income, poverty and health insurance, and amount to an annual check-up on the economic status of average Americans. They are based on extensive surveys and analysis.

During last year’s epic economic collapse, employers shed 22.4 million jobs in March and April, the sharpest decline since records began in the 1940s. Weekly applications for unemployment benefits topped 6 million in a single week in April, by far the highest on record. Since then, the economy has recovered three-quarters of those lost jobs, but the U.S. still has 5.3 million fewer positions than before the pandemic.

A basic indicator of the economic health of the middle class registered the shock.

The median — or midpoint — household income decreased by 2.9% to $67,521 in 2020. The median is a dividing line, with half of American households having lower incomes and the other half, higher. It was the first statistically significant drop in that measure in nearly a decade.

Driving the erosion, the number of people with earnings from work fell by about 3 million and the number of full-time year-round workers contracted by some 13.7 million.

Below those toplines it was a story of haves and have-nots.

People who held on to steady year-round jobs saw an increase in economic well-being, with their median earnings rising 6.9% after adjusting for inflation. People on the lower rungs of the job market, those with part-time jobs or trying to stay afloat in the gig economy, lost ground as median earnings decreased 1.2% for workers overall.

Despite widespread concerns that the pandemic would make millions more Americans uninsured, health coverage held its own in 2020, Census found. More than 91% of Americans had insurance, but 28 million were uninsured.

But Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation said the numbers revealed some glaring exceptions. For example, 38% of poor working age adults in the dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid were uninsured. Biden’s budget bill would provide a workaround.

“It would be hard to find a group that struggles more to get access to affordable health care,” Levitt said.

Congress passed five bipartisan COVID-19 response bills last year, totaling close to $3.5 trillion and signed into law by then-President Donald Trump. This year Democrats pushed through Biden’s nearly $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on party-line votes. Its effects are not reflected in the Census reports.

Though some of the federal aid last year was delayed for reasons from wrangling over costs to problems with distribution, on the whole it insulated families from economic disaster that would have compounded the public health crisis. Some were left out, such as people not legally authorized to be in the country.

As Americans fought over measures like mask wearing and closing down businesses and community life, lawmakers of both parties were motivated to take dramatic action, said economist Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago expert on poverty.

“You had Democrats who were very focused on helping those who were unemployed and hurting, and you had Republicans who were willing to do many things to help the reelection of their president, so there was a confluence of incentives, or of desires, by politicians on both sides,” he said.

On a historical note, the Census reports documented that government aid was much more effective in preventing poverty last year than in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 Great Recession, a decade earlier. Even after accounting for government programs, the supplemental measure of poverty rose in 2010, while it fell sharply in 2020. That reflects how much more financial juice was provided by Congress and the Trump administration in 2020, compared with President Barack Obama’s roughly $900 billion package in 2009.

That’s relevant to the current debate over Biden’s social infrastructure plan, said public policy analyst Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution think tank.

“For people who have a cynical view that nothing much government does works effectively, particularly on the poverty front, it will be harder to maintain that view,” said Greenstein, who founded the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit advocating on behalf of low-income people.

Among other provisions, the Biden plan extends tax credits for families with children, which is seen as a strategy for reducing childhood poverty and its long-term consequences. The Census reports for 2020 showed that childhood poverty would have increased without the impact of government benefits. Instead it declined.

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Census taker Linda Rothfield’s government-issued iPhone kept directing her back to apartments in San Francisco that she already knew were vacant. When she did find apartments that were occupied, she was sometimes turned away because of the pandemic.

“I had a few landlords who said, ‘It’s COVID. You can’t come in,’” Rothfield said.

In a national headcount turned upside down by natural disasters, political turmoil and a deadly virus, apartment renters proved particularly hard to count last year. That has former census takers and experts worried that the tally failed to account for all of them.

Overlooking people in the nation’s 44 million rental homes carries a potentially high price. Because the census helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal money is spent each year, the lower numbers would mean less government help to pay for schools, roads and medical services in those communities.

Around 36% of homes in the U.S. are occupied by renters, up from 33% during the last census a decade ago.

Under the best of circumstances, renters are among the hardest people to count because they tend to be more transient and are more likely to live below the poverty line. They also tend to be disproportionately people of color, who also are traditionally undercounted in the census, according to The Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights group.

Incomplete data on the race or ethnic background of renters could also hinder the formation of Black- or Hispanic-majority political districts.

Renters typically have lower self-response rates than homeowners, so the government relies more on census takers knocking on their doors, said Jeri Green, a former senior adviser at the Census Bureau, who served as a consultant to the National Urban League during the 2020 census.

“This is a population that was at risk of being missed prior to COVID,” Green said. “We know it’s a challenge for the Census Bureau to accurately enumerate renters.”

During the 2010 census, renters were undercounted by 1.1%, but the rate was higher for some tenants. Black male renters between ages 30 and 49 were undercounted by 12.2%, and Hispanic male renters between ages 18 and 29 were undercounted by 8.6%, according to the Leadership Conference Education Fund.

Delays from the pandemic caused the Census Bureau to eliminate a step ahead of the door-knocking phase where census supervisors meet with building managers or landlords to find out which apartments were vacant or occupied, so census takers won’t waste their time knocking on vacant units, the agency said in a statement.

“We were, however, able to inform the landlords or managers that enumerators would be visiting and asking for their cooperation prior to the start of the operation,” the statement said, adding that bureau officials were confident in the work of census takers.

In cases where renters did not respond to census questionnaires, or census takers were unable to interview them, the Census Bureau had to use other, less reliable methods to count them. Those methods included using administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service or the Social Security Administration, asking neighbors or postal workers for information or using a last-resort statistical technique.

Some 60% of census supervisors surveyed by the Governmental Accountability Office for a study on 2020 census operations reported that their census takers had difficulties completing caseloads because they were unable to get into apartment buildings.

“The pandemic made communication with the building managers difficult,” the GAO said in a report issued in March. “Specifically (supervisors) told us that enumerators were often turned away from accessing multi-unit buildings because of the pandemic.”

Nathan Bean, a census supervisor in Chicago, said that even when he was able to reach property managers by phone last summer, they would often say, “‘We aren’t going to answer your calls. We aren’t going to answer your questions.’”

How much renters were undercounted, if they actually were missed, will not be known until December and early next year with the release of a survey that measures the accuracy of the count.

The Census Bureau already has released 2020 census figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets, and those numbers showed how just a few dozen people being counted or overlooked made a big difference. If 89 more people had been tallied, New York would not have lost a congressional seat. If 26 people had been missed in Minnesota, the Gopher State would have lost a seat.

Numbers used for redrawing congressional and legislative districts will not be ready until August.

Jan Rice, who worked as a census taker in Denver, said she was frustrated that she was prohibited from contacting apartment managers on her own so she could get information on occupied units and remove vacant units from the database, sparing other census takers from wasting their time. When she tried it, her supervisor told her, “‘Your job is to knock on doors,’” she said.

“It killed our productivity,” Rice said. “If you don’t count them correctly, you don’t give them a voice.”

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Altogether, the U.S. population rose to 331,449,281 last year, the Census Bureau said Monday, a 7.4% increase over the previous decade that was the second slowest ever. Experts say that paltry pace reflects the combination of an aging population, slowing immigration and the scars of the Great Recession more than a decade ago, which led many young adults to delay marriage and families.

The new allocation of congressional seats comes in the first release of data from last year’s headcount. The numbers generally chart familiar American migration patterns: Texas and Florida, two Republican Sunbelt giants, added enough population to gain congressional seats as chillier climes like New York and Ohio saw slow growth and lost political muscle.

The report also confirms one historic marker: For the first time in 170 years of statehood, California is losing a congressional seat, a result of slowed migration to the nation’s most populous state, which was once a symbol of the country’s expansive frontier.

The state population figures, known as the apportionment count, determine distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year. They also mark the official beginning of once-a-decade redistricting battles. The numbers released Monday, along with more detailed data expected later this year, will be used by state legislatures or independent commissions to redraw political maps to account for shifts in population.

It’s been a bumpy road getting this far. The 2020 census faced a once-in-a-century coronavirus pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, allegations of political interference with the Trump administration’s failed effort to add a citizenship question, fluctuating deadlines and lawsuits.

Texas was the biggest winner — the second-most populous state added two congressional seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Colorado, Montana and Oregon all added residents and gained a seat each. States losing seats included Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The new numbers contain some surprises. Though Texas and Florida grew, the final census count had them each gaining one fewer seat than expected. Arizona, another fast-growing state that demographers considered a sure bet to pick up a new seat, failed to get one. All three states have large Latino populations that represent about half their growth, and this could be an early sign that Hispanics shied away from the Trump administration’s count.

Still, Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he wasn’t ready to “sound the alarm” over the underperformance of states with large Hispanic populations. He noted that he believes Hispanic growth helped states like Colorado and Oregon each gain seats and prevented states like New York and Illinois from losing more.

Congressional reapportionment is a zero sum game, with states divvying up the 435 House seats based on population advantages that can be strikingly small. If New York had counted 89 more residents, the state would have kept its seat and Minnesota would have lost one, officials said. Minnesota, which had the nation’s highest self-response rate, also secured the last House seat in 2010.

The reshuffling of the congressional map moved seats from blue states to red ones, giving Republicans a clear, immediate advantage. The party will have complete control of drawing the congressional maps in Texas, Florida and North Carolina — states that are adding four seats.

In contrast, though Democrats control the process in Oregon, Democratic lawmakers there have agreed to give Republicans an equal say in redistricting in exchange for a commitment to stop blocking bills. In Democratic Colorado, a nonpartisan commission will draw the lines, meaning the party won’t have total control in a single expanding state’s redistricting.

The overall numbers confirm what demographers have long warned — that the country’s growth is stalling. Many had expected growth to come in even below the 1930s levels given the long hangover of the Great Recession and the drying up of immigration, which came to a virtual halt during last year’s pandemic.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., warned that even a recovering economy may not change the trend with the population aging rapidly and immigration contentious. “Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,” Frey said.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to move to GOP-run states. For now, that shift provides the Republicans with the opportunity to shape new congressional districts to maximize the influence of their voters and have a major advantage in upcoming elections — possibly enough to win back control of the U.S. House.

But in the long term, it’s not clear the migration is good news for Republicans. Many of the fastest growing states are increasingly competitive political battlegrounds where the new arrivals — including many young people and people of color — could at some point give Democrats an edge.

“What’s happening is growth in Sunbelt states that are trending Democratic or will soon trend Democratic,” Frey said.

That means Republicans may be limited in how many favorable seats they can draw as Democrats move to their territory.

“It’s going to be harder and harder for the Texas Legislature to gerrymander advantageous congressional districts” for Republicans, said William Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston. “Texas hasn’t flipped blue yet as a state, but the blue population centers are growing really fast.”

Fulton, who moved to Texas from California, said his new home has become “the new California — the big state that’s adding a lot of population.” He believes California risks becoming the new Northeast — which he characterized as a stagnant, crowded area that retains wealth and intellectual clout but loses innovators to more promising places.

Despite California’s slow growth, the state still has 10 million more residents than Texas.

North Carolina and Texas, Fulton said, are positioned to become the intellectual powerhouses of the new economy, as the South has snatched away major manufacturing industries like automobiles from the Rust Belt. “We are 10-20 years away from the South and the West being truly dominant in American culture and American society,” Fulton said.

But population booms also bring new burdens, like increased traffic, rising home prices and strains on an infrastructure already grappling with climate change — vividly illustrated when the Texas power grid failed in the winter storms of February.

The pattern outlined in the the Census data was one started in the 1930s with the development of modern air-conditioning and has been steady since then. The change in the pattern this time was California.

Home prices have soared in California, contributing to a stream of residents leaving for other Western states. Those relocations helped turn Colorado and Nevada into Democratic states and made Arizona competitive.

“That’s the California exodus, blue state immigrants,” Frey said. “Californians are taking their votes and moving to other places.”

The power shift is also being driven by Hispanics. Over the decade, Hispanics accounted for around half of the growth in Arizona, Florida and Texas, according to figures from the American Community Survey, a Census Bureau program separate from the decennial census.

The legal deadline for turning in the apportionment numbers was Dec. 31, but the Census Bureau pushed back that date to April because of challenges caused by the pandemic and the need for more time to correct not-unexpected irregularities.

More detailed figures will be released later this year showing populations by race, Hispanic origin, gender and housing at geographic levels as small as neighborhoods. This redistricting data will be used for redrawing precise congressional and legislative districts.

President Joe Biden sent Monday’s numbers to the Capitol, where the House clerk has 15 days to notify governors.

MIKE SCHNEIDER and NICHOLAS RICCARDI • AP News

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Los Angeles

Census takers throughout Southern California have started following up with households that have not yet responded to the 2020 Census.

The current self-response rates in each of the five counties within the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area are:

Los Angeles County 59.9%

Orange County 71.9%

San Bernardino County 61.1%

Riverside County 62.0%

Ventura County 72.3%

The Census Bureau is visiting the remaining non-responsive addresses in its database to collect responses in person.

Households can still respond now by completing and mailing back the paper questionnaire they received, by responding online at 2020census.gov, or by phone at 844-330-2020. Households can also respond online or by phone in one of 13 languages and find assistance in many more. Those that respond will not need to be visited to obtain their census response.

What Households Can Expect

The Census Bureau is providing face masks to census takers and requires that census takers wear a mask while conducting their work. They are following CDC and local public health guidelines when they visit. Census takers must complete a virtual COVID-19 training on social distancing protocols and other health and safety guidance before beginning their work in neighborhoods.

Census takers are hired from local communities. All census takers speak English and many are bilingual. If a census taker does not speak the householder’s language, the household may request a return visit from a census taker who does. Census takers also have materials on hand to help identify the household’s language.

If no one is home when the census taker visits, the census taker will leave a notice of their visit with information about how to respond online, by phone or by mail. People are encouraged to cooperate with census takers and ensure that everyone who was living in their household as of April 1, 2020, is counted.

How to Identify Census Takers

Census takers can be easily identified by a valid government ID badge with their photograph, a U.S. Department of Commerce watermark, and an expiration date on the badge. To confirm a census taker’s identity, the public may contact their regional census center to speak with a Census Bureau representative.

About the 2020 Census

The U.S. Constitution mandates a census of the population every 10 years. The goal of the 2020 Census is to count everyone who lives in the United States on April 1, 2020 (Census Day). Census statistics are used to determine the number of seats each state holds in the U.S. House of Representatives and informs how billions of dollars in federal funds will be allocated by state, local and federal lawmakers annually for the next 10 years.

For more information, visit 2020census.gov

-Patricia Ramos

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Political reality is that Donald Trump’s plan, carried out by the Census Bureau answering to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, has become one front in the President’s long campaign to punish California for giving his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton enough votes for a national popular vote victory over Trump. He has acted against California wherever he could since then, attempting, among other things, to eliminate the state’s authority to regulate smog and threatening to cut emergency services after major fires and floods.

But the Census question he wants to add, not asked for 70 years – “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” – is his most insidious anti-California move.

The Census Bureau long ago abandoned the question for two reasons: One was that the Constitution requires no such query, but just an “enumeration” of the “whole number of free persons” every 10 years. The second was that even with primitive polling methods available in the late 1940s, the bureau determined that asking this question would drive hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people to do whatever they could to avoid being counted.

The writers of the Constitution mandated that the Census measure actual population of the entire country and each state and hamlet in it in order to apportion Congressional representation for the next decade. That’s the sole use the Constitution lists for Census information. But over more than two centuries, other laws have required using the same data to dole out federal money for everything from highways and sewers to medical care for indigents.

In California, federal money funds local government nutrition programs, public schools, highways, housing assistance and much more.

The state Department of Finance concluded California will lose $1,950 for every person not counted. This means the amount at stake here could total billions of dollars now used for vital services, if this one question scares even close to 1 million undocumented immigrants away from getting counted. A low count could also cost the state at least one seat in Congress, another outcome Trump would enjoy.

But Trump’s aides insist the question aims to get valuable information, nothing more.

U.S. District Judge George J. Hazel of Maryland, a Barack Obama appointee, concluded the government added the question “to depress the count of immigrant communities of color, thereby decreasing this population’s impact on and benefit from apportioned political power,” and that Ross (and Trump) “engineered the…rationale to cloak (its) true purpose.” Another federal judge held that Ross “made misleading statements” about the reasons for the question.

Those strong statements can be overruled by the Supreme Court, which fast-tracked the case because of a June 30 deadline for getting Census forms to the Government Printing Office and will rule before its term ends in mid-June.

One argument the government makes is that a similar question has been asked of some people during the last 70 years, so why not everyone? During that time, the query went only to relatively small groups in an effort to get information about specific population segments. The question, in fact, has never been asked of all Census respondents.

That’s part of a Census tradition of getting only a few facts from every person surveyed, while using more detailed questionnaires on smaller, but representative, groups.

The upshot is that if this question survives at the Supreme Court, as appears likely with the court’s political makeup, it could be problematic for everyone in California. And while state Attorney General Xavier Becerra has fervently fought its inclusion, once the court rules, he can do nothing more.

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