Earlier deadline for census has officials reeling
Count already disrupted by pandemic is set to end a month sooner than planned
Cristina Caltagirone paused to catch her breath as she laid out everything she suddenly had to do in the face of a new deadline.
Drive promotional materials about the U.S. census to rural communities throughout Rio Arriba County.
Prepare more radio announcements alerting people about the count.
Set up a mobile census site.
Send an email to the U.S. Census Bureau telling officials the deadline change will be “catastrophic” for her county.
The bureau announced late Monday it will end all efforts to count the nation’s residents by Sept. 30 — a month sooner than initially planned. Those efforts include knocking on doors, collecting online responses and making phone calls to ensure the 10-year count includes every resident.
“I feel they are setting us up to fail,” said Caltagirone, a special projects coordinator for Rio Arriba County’s economic development department.
As of Tuesday, only about a quarter of the county’s households had filled out their online census forms.
New Mexico invested heavily in initiatives to help get an accurate count, especially in hard-to-reach places such as tribal communities and remote villages. At stake are hundreds of million of federal dollars for public programs.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, putting activities like door-knocking off-limits. So far, only 53 percent of New Mexicans have submitted household information to the Census Bureau, according to the agency.
State leaders, county officials, nonprofits and Native American activists are now scrambling to find ways to count as many more residents as possible with less than 60 days to go. Hundreds of census workers gathered at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center on Tuesday for training on how to make the final push.
Nora Meyers Sackett, a spokeswoman for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, called the new census deadline “an appalling dereliction of duty.”
“Anything less than an accurate and fair Census will leave too many New Mexicans without resources and programs to which they’re entitled,” Sackett said in an email. “Every New Mexican deserves to be counted.”
Patricia Boies, director of Santa Fe County’s Health Services Division, called the census “a cornerstone of our democracy.”
“The census happens once every 10 years,” she said, “so whatever count we get over the short time remaining will control [federal funding] for the coming decade. Any undercount will be detrimental, as virtually every aspect of health and welfare would be affected.”
Caltagirone fears Rio Arriba County residents will remain severely undercounted by Sept. 30.
Other parts of the state appear to be in trouble as well.
During a hearing Tuesday, an advocate for Native American communities told state lawmakers on the Indian Affairs Committee that just 33 percent of all Native people in New Mexico have submitted census information.
“We have a lot of high stakes right now to make sure everyone gets counted, and the shortened timeline is gonna make that reach difficult,” said Ahtza Dawn Chavez, who heads the Albuquerque-based NAVA Education Project, a nonprofit designed to get voter and census information to Native Americans.
The early deadline has “put a big wrench” in her organization’s plans to get the word out, she said — particularly within a community that has been plagued by COVID-19.
The public health crisis has created barriers to accessing tribal lands, and pueblos have initiated lockdown practices to help keep the highly contagious illness from further spreading among their people.
“We still have to count about 64 percent of our population just to get to the numbers that were counted in 2010 — which was already an undercount,” Chavez told the committee. She cited 2010 census data that showed Native Americans in New Mexico were undercounted by about 5 percent that year.
The federal government uses census data to allocate aid for a wide range of programs — from education and health care to housing, transportation and capital infrastructure. According to a 2018 report by George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy, 300 federal projects distribute about $800 billion a year based on census-generated population numbers.
And several national reports say New Mexico is one of the most regularly undercounted states in the nation.
With the new deadline, said Keegan King, policy bureau chief for the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department, getting an accurate count will be even more of a challenge this year.
“That’s a real concern for tribal communities,” he said. An undercount “could have a huge impact on their economies.”
Even before the Census Bureau imposed the new deadline, a number of issues were slowing efforts to reach New Mexico residents.
State Sen. Shannon Pinto, D-Gallup, a member of the Legislature’s Indian Affairs Committee, said many households in rural and tribal communities don’t have a computer, a major obstacle to an accurate count.
And in remote locations in the state, including Rio Arriba County communities, the vast majority of residents receive mail at post office boxes rather than at their home addresses. The Census Bureau does not deliver information to P.O. boxes.
“The P.O. box problem seems designed to undercount rural communities and probably Native American communities,” said Lauren Reichelt, director of health and human services for Rio Arriba County. “It seems like more deliberate incompetence.”