Traveling by skis and snowshoes in some areas, federal census takers in New Mexico have begun the work of counting the state's estimated 2 million-plus residents.

The nationwide 2010 Census got under way this month with millions of households slated to receive a newly streamlined questionnaire designed to boost public participation — especially in New Mexico, where the response rate in 2000 was one of the lowest in the country.

Most households will receive census forms in the mail during the next several days, although census takers began delivering some questionnaires March 1 to people who don't get their mail at home. In the northern mountain communities of Angel Fire and Eagle Nest, where snowfall has made travel difficult in places, census takers have been strapping on snowshoes and cross-country skis to make their way to remote cabins.

"Some of the driveways are 3 miles long through pretty deep snow. So that's the only way we can get in," said census team member Eliza Hadley, based in Taos.

The census is a tradition in New Mexico that dates to the late 1600s, a century before the fledgling U.S. government conducted its first census in 1790.

Conducted every 10 years, the census determines how many congressional seats a state is entitled to, and it is a key factor in calculating how much federal aid states receive.

Today, about 40 percent of the federal money New Mexico receives for Medicaid, low-income housing, food stamps, education, transportation, senior services other social programs is based on population information gathered during the census. New Mexico ranks ninth among the 50 states in the amount of federal dollars received on the basis of census data, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution of Washington, D.C.

Despite the benefits, many New Mexicans resist being counted. The U.S. Census Bureau has labeled the state's population as one of the most difficult to enumerate.

Up to 54 percent of the state's residents live in areas that the Census Bureau designates "hard to count" — the highest such percentage in the country. Typically rural and poor, hard-to-count areas are places where census takers have trouble getting to residents or where people refuse to be counted. Ironically, these are the same places that often benefit most from government aid that is based on the census count.

Lincoln County had the lowest response rate in the state to the 2000 Census. There, only 39 percent of residents returned their questionnaires. Northern New Mexico scored the lowest as a region, with Rio Arriba, Taos, Mora, Colfax and San Miguel counties all posting response rates of 50 percent or less. Santa Fe County registered 64 percent, just under the statewide average which, in turn, was 7 percentage points below the nationwide response rate of 72 percent.

This year, census officials are hoping to elicit a greater response by doing more to publicize the benefits of an accurate count. The Census Bureau is also employing more census takers who are known to local residents, and it is holding promotional events, including a barbecue in Taos on March 28, where officials tentatively plan to offer gifts, such as CDs, to people who fill out their forms on the spot.

The key element of the 2010 strategy is a simplified census form, which will start showing up in people's mailboxes this week. It asks just 10 questions of each household resident, focusing on age, gender, race, type of home and number of occupants.

Gone is the old long form, which was designed to collect a broad range of socioeconomic information. Instead, the Census Bureau has been gathering that information by surveying segments of the population every year.

Those surveys are not as accurate as the decennial head counts because the findings come from sampling small groups. Still, the survey results offer a sneak preview of the 2010 Census. For example, it appears that the sizzling growth rate experienced by New Mexico and several other Western states during the 1990s has tapered off, with New Mexico about to register its third pokiest growth rate since 1912, when it became a state.

New Mexico's population in 2009 was 2,009,671, or 10.5 percent greater than it was in 2000, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau's survey results by Research & Polling Inc. of Albuquerque. The state's population grew by 20 percent between 1990 and 2000.

New Mexico will not add enough people to trigger the creation of a fourth congressional seat, said Brian Sanderoff of Research & Polling. However, population declines in many rural parts of the state could lead to loss of some legislative seats in those areas, Sanderoff said.

The state's growth has been limited mainly to the largest cities, including Santa Fe, which has grown 15.5 percent since 2000, from just over 62,000 in 2000 to nearly 72,000 in 2008, according to Research & Polling. The county has grown as well, to 143,000 in 2008.

Northern New Mexico census takers will use a multistage process to achieve a complete head count, said Elmer Maestas of the Census Bureau's Santa Fe office, which is responsible for 16 counties. Maestas said census takers will deliver 113,000 forms to homes, while another 123,000 will go out in the mail.

Then, on Monday, census takers will visit 22,000 households, mostly on pueblos and other tribal lands, where they will conduct a door-to-door oral census. Later in the month, census workers will undertake perhaps their hardest chore: trying to get an accurate count of homeless people at shelters, missions, parks and temporary encampments.

In April and May, census takers will re-canvass households that have not returned their forms. Maestas said the Census Bureau anticipates revisiting more than 100,000 homes in Northern New Mexico alone, with most of the re-canvassing likely to occur in rural areas, where the response rate has been lowest in the past.

An undercount of rural residents could have the effect of depressing already shrinking numbers in many counties. Research and Polling estimates that 18 of the state's 32 counties lost population during the past decade, all of them rural. The biggest losers, to date, are Hidalgo County (with a 17.2 percent decline) in the state's far southwest corner, along with Harding (15.6 percent), De Baca (14.9 percent), Quay (12.1 percent), and Union (9.5 percent) counties in Eastern New Mexico. In the north, Colfax County's population has fallen by 8.6 percent, San Miguel by 5.2 percent, Mora by 2.5 percent, Rio Arriba by 1.2 percent and Los Alamos by 1.1 percent.

"The point we try to make over and over with people is that they only hurt themselves by refusing to take part in the census," said Mike Trujillo, the director of community development in Taos County, where the population has grown by 5.2 percent.

Trujillo said Taos County's share of federal dollars distributed on the basis of census data amounts to $1,700 per county resident. But as a former director of public works for the county, Trujillo knows how hard it can be to persuade some people that government is there to help them.

"When we would go out to grade the roads in some of our rural areas, we'd get shot at, or someone would put sugar in our gas tanks. It got so we had to have a state police escort with our graders," Trujillo said.

"People are very sensitive about others entering their land," said Española Mayor Joseph Maestas, who like Trujillo is helping out with the census. "There's an inherent dislike, and if it's the federal government, it's more so."

But both Trujillo and Maestas said the inaccessibility of many rural households is perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting an accurate count. "You've got long stretches of unpopulated land and unpredictable spring weather that can make dirt roads impassable," said Maestas, who noted that census takers failed to find his Santa Cruz home in 2000. "I wasn't counted."

This year, Census Bureau officials say they are making a concerted effort to hire census takers who are already familiar with the neighborhoods they canvass. According to bureau officials in the Santa Fe office, the only problems reported by census takers, so far, have been a few dog bites.

In Santa Fe County, the Census Bureau reports that about 16 percent of the population lived in hard-to-count areas in 2000.

Elmer Maestas of the Santa Fe office said census takers assigned to the city and county this year anticipate having the hardest time getting an accurate count in neighborhoods that are heavily populated with undocumented immigrants, who are often reluctant to be interviewed, such as in the Airport Road area.

"We will do our best to assure people that the information we get from them is confidential," Maestas said.

While survey data indicates that both Santa Fe city and county have grown since 2000, the geographic distribution of the area's burgeoning population won't be clear until next year, after all of the data has been analyzed.

One question that the 2010 head count will help address is just how ethnically segregated the city is becoming.

Following the 2000 Census, analysis of the metropolitan area by the city's long-term planning office revealed that Santa Fe's famously diverse population was moving apart, with the northern half of the city increasingly Anglo, older and wealthier, and the southern half comparatively younger, more often Hispanic and less affluent.

According to the analysis, metropolitan Santa Fe, which takes in some of the most densely populated parts of the county, grew by 20 percent between 1990 and 2000. At the same time, the total population of northern census tracts declined slightly.

While the urban Hispanic population grew by 28 percent between 1990 and 2000, it declined by 9 percent in the northern census tracts. That left less than one-third of Hispanic residents living in the northern half of urban Santa Fe.

The Census Bureau will begin releasing complete 2010 results early next year.

Surveys reveal Santa Fe trends

Although the 2010 Census hasn't yet disclosed tract-by-tract population movements, the bureau's ongoing surveys provide an overall view of city and county trends. For example, the latest survey results show that the largest age group in both the city and county was composed of people between 45 and 64, who make up about 30 percent of the population. The city's analysis of survey data found that Santa Fe's median household income rose from $41,200 in 2000 to about $50,000 in 2009.

The surveys found that 12 percent to 15 percent of city and county residents were living below the poverty level in 2008. The recession's impact is reflected in unemployment figures. Countywide unemployment jumped from 3.6 percent in 2000 to 6 percent last year — and reached 7.7 percent in January 2010, according to the state.

Housing data shows that the median home price in Santa Fe vaulted from $203,000 in 2000 to $371,000 in 2007 before falling back to $308,000 last year. That was still well above the national median home price of $173,000.

By 2008, the median monthly mortgage payment for city homeowners was $1,586 in 2008, and the median monthly rental cost was $892. Nearly 60 percent of renters were spending 30 percent or more of household income on housing.

According to the data, families made up 62 percent of all households in the county in 2008, with an average household size of 2.6 people. The majority of nonfamily households consisted of people living alone.

Surveys found that 35 percent of county residents over the age of 5 spoke a language other than English at home and that 38 percent said they did not speak English very well.



The New Mexican