Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, November 16, 2010,
Item 2
Number 2 is to receive updates and to appropriate action on Travis County activity surrounding the 2010 census.
including an update of final Travis County and city of Austin mail in participation rates in the 2010 effort.
and mr. Ep stein has asked that we take up 2 b later in the morning when Commissioner Gomez has joined us.
so we will just get the briefing in a and call up b for action later.
right?
>> that is fine, judge.
good morning, judge Biscoe and member of the court.
we have a very brief powerpoint presentation for you that highlights some of the materials that are in your backup.
as you know, the court created an Austin Travis County complete count committee jointly with the city of Austin last year in September.
we brought together a group of civic leaders from all around the community in order to educate and motivate people by participating in the census.
the census is conducted only one every ten years so it's very important that as many people as possible participate.
and the goal of the complete count committee was to get the word out about it.
we are very lucky in very constablel bruce el shawn and eric shepherd serve as co chairs of the committee.
we want to report on the final efforts of the group and let you know about an event this evening.
let me call your attention to the slide.
this is in your back jump and we just handed out to you.
this is the final census participation rates for Travis County.
ranging anywhere from less than 40 percent all the way to above 80.
you have can see in most areas we had a good response rate.
we are very happy about this.
next slide shows a significant improvement over the 202000 effort.
as you can see both the stenand Travis County significantly raised their census participation rate in this decade.
even though the participation rate for the state went up by only a percentage point and the national participation rate stayed the same..
ation members of the court will remember, there was sort of an anti census mood in the country this year which became an effort that we had to overcome in terms of our messaging and community education efforts.
so we're very proud of the fact again both the city of Austin and Travis County markedly improved their participation rates.
next slide shows you the participation rates of all the major urban counties in Texas and shows how we did very well to many of the counties with a 73 percent rate.
final slide gives you an idea of what the participate ation rate was like around the state.
as you can see there were some areas that did not respond as well as Travis County and the central Texas area did.
so we're very proud of the work of the committee and I want to recognize our cochair, constable bruce erfan, thank you him for his work.
this would not be possible without the leadership of the Commissioners court and the commitment to ebb gauge the county through all the tax offices, community center, satellite offices, justice of the peace offices in getting the word out.
we're grateful to the court for its leadership.
bruce wants to make a couple of additional comments.
>> thank you.
good morning, members of the court.
>> judge, when we were here before and concerned about the participation rate we were ringing our hands.
you made a comment about we may start slow but we are going to finish strong.
that turned out to be what happened much to our surprise but appreciate ation.
we finished stronger than the state of Texas.
hopefully that gets us ahead.
we are appreciatetive to the court and council and all the members of our complete count committee for all the work they did.
we certainly pounded on a lot of communities for many months to get this word out.
we are having a reception this evening hosted by the mayor at his balcony at five o'clock this evening for all the members of the complete count committee and the city council members who worked so hard on this.
so we certainly invite you all to join us.
we will be waiting with great anticipation to see the final numbers in March.
>> as the members of the court know, there is proclamations that we have asked the court to approve, thank youing all the members of the complete count committee.
and judge, I understand that you want to wait until Commissioner Gomez is here to approve that.
>> should we, we do plan for her to sign those 50 resolutions.
so I think she needs to be in court for the action to sign them.
>> absolutely, yes.
>> it will be good to have all of our signatures on them, I believe.
we appreciate your help with this.
and judge shepherd co chairing.
our goal is still 100 percent.
>> absolutely.
>> we are slowly working our way toward it.
>> may I ask a question?
>> certainly.
>> I?m looking at the third slide in on the graph regarding the urban counties in Texas and final rate.
and interested to get y'all's input because I found this interesting.
seems that the more demographically diverse counties had a more difficult time with getting a higher percentage, whereas the more homogeneous counties had a better performance.
so what that is indicate to go me is that for those of us in these major urbanizing corridors getting folks involved in being counted is really really important to us.
and I?d like to hear a little bit about the very successful efforts that we mounted in order to get outside the eco chamber of people naturally involved to folks who are less involved in their local political scene.
>> we particularly targeted, Commissioner, four populations who historically have been difficult to recruit and get to participate in the census.
one is, oddly enough, students who, for whatever reason, don't feel like they are tied to where they are living even though the census asks them to complete the information based on that.
so we had an extensive outreach effort not only at the university at Austin but the other college campuses here in town.
we have targeted the spanish language predominant or spanish language primary community.
if you look at the map showing the results in Travis County, there was, there's a population area over there around riverside and, riverside area that was tough to penetrate but we worked closely with the spanish chamber of commerce and other groups.
we also had outreach effort to homeless population that was very significant and think was significantly better than the effort made a decade ago.
and then we also had a very strong network in the asian american community and in the south asian community and had great collaboration and outreach on their part.
>> we are a diverse communities and the messages was a challenge.
we started by trying to bring together leaders of all these different communities to ask them, you know, how do we reach these populations.
and I think our efforts were pretty successful.
>> I really appreciate you for those efforts because the voices of those specific communities are not often heard, and we're going to see that their voices are not heard in the coming legislative session.
>> as we know, every voice counts equally.
>> that is right.
thank you so much.
>> thank you for taking the lead.
we'll call up sub part b later this morning.
>> thanks very much.
>> thank you.
2 b, receive update.
we already did this morning.
b, approve resolution changing members of the Austin-Travis County and congratulating them on success of their efforts.
>> move approval.
>> second.
>> discussion?
>> only to say I think mr. Eckstein is at the legislature right now on a specific subcommittee hearing that he had requested.
>> all in favor?
this is for the resolution for the complete count committee.
>> right.
>> are you supportive?
>> yes.
>> that passes by unanimous vote.
four hands raised and one not.
do we want to do 21 without mr. Eckstein?
>> a couple of things in there, judge.
>> want to wait until next week?
>> we could probably lay it out --
>> I have a couple of people that have come down on 21.
on the legislative stuff.
and I really want scott and --
>> call it up.
>> yes, please.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 3:20 PM
