Ultimately, it could cost them congressional seats and federal funding for highways, schools and health care.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Even though they’re neighbors, two New Mexico counties couldn’t be further apart in the rate of people answering the 2020 census.
Los Alamos County, where the atomic bomb was born and many people are highly educated, has one of the nation’s highest response rates at 79 percent. Rio Arriba County, where a language other than English is spoken in over half of homes, is at the bottom at 9 percent.
The reason for the difference? Households in Rio Arriba and other rural counties across the U. S. rely on census workers to drop off their questionnaires, which was on hold for a month and a half because of the coronavirus pandemic.
While the U. S. Census Bureau is restarting that work, leaders in rural America worry it will be difficult to catch up in communities that are already among the toughest to count. Ultimately, it could cost them congressional seats and federal funding for highways, schools and health care that the once-a-decade count divvies up.
“We have historically been underrepresented in the past, and there’s an unfortunate precedent to show we will be underrepresented again. This pandemic makes it all the more challenging,” said Javier Sanchez, mayor of Espanola, a city of 10,000 in Rio Arriba County. “I think we are struggling like every other rural community and doing the best we can amid these problems when so much is at stake in the next 10 years.”
A rolling census count shows that states with large rural populations are lagging behind the rest of the nation in answering the 2020 questionnaire. They have the largest concentration of households dependent on receiving forms from census workers in the spring.
Around 5 percent of U. S. households fall into that category, but it accounts for anywhere from about 17 percent to almost 30 percent of homes in Alaska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Wyoming, Maine, Vermont and Montana.
These are places where homes are spread apart and often hidden from main roads. Internet access is poor, and this is the first census that most people are encouraged to respond online.
