Travis County Commissioners Court
April 20, 2010,
Item 15
>> number 15, receive update and take appropriate action on travis county activities surrounding the 2010 census, including: a, update on travis county and city of austin participation rates in the 2010 census effort. B, report on austin-travis county complete count committee efforts to build grassroots awareness of the 17 sus. And c, discussion of travis county contribution to complete count committees grassroots outreach efforts.
>> good afternoon, judge and members of the court. Deek eckstein, joined by the always entertaining counsel bruce elephant who serves as the co-chair of the austin travis county complete count committee. You have some backup materials in your packet, but we also have prepared a powerpoint presentation which is load upped on the laptop for the media people. And quoaps of which you have -- and copies of which you have all received. I want to begin by thanking the court for the leadership it's given on this issue. This has really been an extraordinary effort on the part of essentially an all citizen group of volunteers and the support that the county has given indirectly through the work of our community centers, the work of our independent elected officials like with the tax offices, the direct clerk, county clerk has really helped this effort quite a bit. Let's look at our results as of now and just evaluate for the court where we stand. If you look, the firsthandout that you have is -- shows census mail participation rates among the various states. The state of texas is now ranked 40th in the country as of friday. So we're now 40th in the country in our participation rate in the census. And within the state of texas if you look at the urban counties in the state of texas, we are at 65%, which is very close to what the state's average is, but as you can see among the big urban counties in texas that puts us in the bottom half of the pack. I might point out that i believe the first time i gave a report to the commissioners court, we were the last of the urban counties. So travis county has actually done a good job to catch up.
>> rock wall is beating the pants all of us. Rockwall, y'all!
>> that's right. The next slide is a shot of the entire county showing the census participation rates in the county. As you can see the purple indicates a 60% return rate or above. What we're talking about now is people -- households that have received their census forms, completed them and returned them. So those --
>> they keep sending two forms, even to households that have already sent them back. I thought that wasn't going to happen.
>> well, commissioner, what has happened is what the census did is they sent out forms in the third week of march and then they sent out another batch of forms to some of the census blocks that back in 2000 had underperformed. Just as an effort to make sure people got a copy and had another copy there at their households. Unfortunately that caught us by surprise and so we weren't able to educate the community about that very much, but the goal, commissioner, was to make sure that some of those households and neighborhoods that hadn't returned forms very well last time had two copies of the forms in case they lost one.
>> i got the second mailer after i sent mine almost right away, the next day after i got mine. It seems like they could keep up with that and not send out more paper.
>> this has been a pretty paper intensive thing and obviously it's being run off a play book that we -- we're getting to see one page at a time. If you look at the travis county map, you will see that very many portions of travis county are doing well. They're at the 60% or better ratio. But the next map shows the -- really what we would call the central city area of travis county. And as you can see, there are some areas in there, particularly the lighter colored areas where the sepsis response rate has been low -- the 17 sus response rate has been low. Let me describe the timing. The census forms, of course april first was census day. The theory was everybody would return their census forms on or about april first. The census continues to accept mail-in forms and so our strategy has been to continue to get the word out to the community to follow up in some of the communities, particularly where there have been less than ideal response rates and to push for everybody to send their form in. As i understand it, the census will accept forms through this -- they will continue to accept forms, but all the forms that they get through this friday will be counted on the mail-in participation rate. If they have not heard back from a household by this friday, then they're going to generate the list of all the houses and they get follow-up visits from the census takers. So i want to turn it over to the constable and the strategies that they have put together to try to do one last public outreach and education effort.
>> thank you. The good news is that travis county has moved up since the last time we visited y'all. The judge said at the time that we were going to be a strong fourth quarter county and i think we're starting to make our move. The bad news is we're still below the means of the large urban counties. And we have almost 400,000 people left to count. That's a lot of people. So the census commission has agreed to keep their phone lines open. Up until july 1st. So for people who have received their forms, we want them to fill it out and send it them. For people who haven't received any form, and that could happen for a number of reasons, the 1-800-number numbers that the census has, you can do it over the phone. For english it's 1866-472-6868. And there's a number of other numbers for other languages. So that is available to the citizens until july first as we understand it. So that's helpful. But we're transportationing into a period where the census enumerators are going to start going out and knocking on doors. And we want to get as many people to complete the census as possible before that. And the reason is that according to sent sus bureau, for every one percent of americans who don't complete the census, it will cost taxpayers $85 million to go knock on their doors. And we're looking at 35% here in travis county who have not completed the census form, so those people will be costing taxpayers an enormous amount of money. So we still have some time to get the form completed if you have it in your hand, mail it in. Or if you want to do it over the phone so you can avoid having a census taker come to your door. Since we have this large group of people, almost 400,000 residents of travis county that we haven't reached yet, our media committee of the complete count committee has asked to come up with a recommendation, how can we reach the other 400,000 people as quickly as we can before the enumerators have to go out there. And what you have is the strategies -- i don't think it's up there yet. The three strategies they came up with. The first one is an e-mail blast to students from u.t. And st. Edwards university. And we've done that over the weekend and it's done. And the second strategy is robo calls into the targeted neighborhoods. You saw the map a couple of slides ago. The riverside area, west campus area, the area along and north of 183 are some of the weakest areas of the county in terms of response rate.
>> it's my precinct.
>> i get an e-mail freferred a former county official telling me how low hyde park is. So i feel your pain. Hopefully we can do better as well. The media strategy, r on. Obocalls and the radio and television will be going on. That's what we've been trying to do for the last couple of weeks is to raise some money from community leaders to help us make that happen. And so far amd and h.e.b. Have contributed a total of i think $12,500. We've certainly got a lot of calls in and we're hope to go raise a significant amount of that money so we can get through the priority list on the media strategy. The good news is that the $12,500 will pay for the first two of the strategies that we've described to the court. The blast e-mails went out this last weekend to 62,000 student at the university of texas at austin and at st. Edwards university. The other strategy is the robo calls. We're now preparing the calls, writing scripts, getting that ready to go and we hope to do that very quickly here. The third piece of the strategy was the tv ads. Tctv has already committed to work with us and so has channel 6 from the city of austin to help actually produce the tv ads. It really a matter of that we want to now buy time on grand warner table, on grande come and on the commercial networks, broadcast networks, to be able to run some of the ads that would be austin, would be specific to central texas and would encourage people to cooperate with their -- with the census takers when they come. They're really at the phase now where the message is send your form in. If you haven't sent your form in, call. But expect a visit from the en17 tus taker and please cooperate with them.
>> and for every percentage point that we miss, we're missing 1 fist million dollars in federal funds over the next decade. And if we miss as many as seven percent of the residents of travis county, that's a billion dollars in funding for roads, for schools, for public work projects, for nonprofit organizations, all manner of funding that is required for us to carry out any large projects. We would be leaving on the table and sending to other communities. It's very important that all residents participate in the census and help out our community, maximize every dollar that we're entitled to.
>> we do not have a dollar figure for bring to the court this week to ask for, but we'd like to come back next week and ask about possible county funding to supplement these efforts by the complete count committee. I'm conscious as i mention that to the court that we just had a discussion about the tightness of the budget and the discipline that we need to have as a county. I will point out that the complete count committee has so far not spent any public monies. This has really been an operation run out of people's pockets, although the county has been very generous in terms of communities like the staff of the community centers really organizing a day for the census. Many of the county departments doing their own internal and external communications with their constituent sis about the census. So there's been a lot of, if you will, sweat equity put into this by the county, but we may need to put some of the other kind of equity in as well. We would like to come back to the court next week, update the court on where we are with our fund-raising effort and perhaps at that time make a specific request.
>> mr. Reeferseed?
>> thank you, sir. I'm speaking in support of the idea to get this right. My question is you already said it, but the -- for the phone numbers, if you could give those one more time. And the question on top of that, about the phone census, all 10 questions have to be answered for the info to get in? In other words, if somebody answers only nine questions, is that info counted?
>> my understanding, mr. Reeferseed, is that if the census receives a form and, say, nine of the 10 questions are answered, if for any reason they think they need to call and follow up, they may call and say you didn't answer this question. Can you answer this question for us? But i believe that census form without all -- i would encourage people to answer all the questions. As you know, none of them require personal financial information. They don't ask for a social security number. Nothing that would put anybody at risk in terms of a violation of privacy or identity theft is even asked on the census questionnaire, but we would encourage people to answer all the questions. But if they don't, send their form in as is.
>> okay. That's great. And the numbers again?
>> 1866272-6868 and 1866-272-98 two for spanish. I think we'll ask the media people if they'll put those numbers up on the placards that air on tctv that circulate and roll out throughout the day.
>> thank you.
>> what action do you request today?
>> no action of the court. We would hike to come back next week and with perhaps a specific request for support of funding by the court for the complete county committee effort.
>> i move that we recess until 12:30 -- 1:30. All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 1:53 PM
