Door-To-Door Census Efforts Resume In Ventura, San Bernardino Counties

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LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – Census workers will resume delivering questionnaires door-to-door in Ventura and San Bernardino counties, a practice that was halted back in March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Douglas Carrasquell of the organization Make the Road New York holds documents as he attends a training meeting about National Census in Queens on March 13, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP) (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday it will hand-deliver questionnaires to thousands of households which do not have physical mailing addresses. That includes 56,088 residences in San Bernardino county and another 1,005 in Ventura County.

The questionnaires will be delivered by field staff who will be required to wear personal protective equipment and drop them off in a contactless process.

The Census Bureau began hand-delivering the questionnaires on March 15, but was forced to suspend the process just three days later due to the outbreak.

The census is taken every 10 years. It determines how many seats are apportioned to each state in the U.S. House, how congressional district boundaries are drawn up and how much federal funding state and local municipalities will receive. All of this is based on population levels.

"This operation is crucial to ensure a complete and accurate count of all communities, which helps guide hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private sector spending per year," the census said in a news release.

Last month, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called the number of households which had responded "embarrassingly low."

So far, 61.3% of Californians have responded to the census, slightly above the national rate of 60.1%.

That's compared to 56.5% of households in L.A. County, 69.4% in Ventura County and 56.8% in San Bernardino County.