The U.S. Census Bureau’s mission is to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy. A link to the homepage is included below, and from there you can navigate to many interesting data sets, including a history of apportionment data. By choosing QuickFacts, you can search for a broad range of data sets for Santa Cruz County.
www.census.gov
The Census is also responsible for providing Public Law 94-171 (PL 94-171) data for redistricting. On February 12, 2021, the Census announced that the delivery of PL 94-171 data would be delayed to September 30, 2021. The data must first be revised to apportion incarcerated persons to their home address, a process that generally takes about 30 days. In California, the apportionment task is performed by the Statewide Database. The deadline for the County to adopt a final map of new district boundaries, based on the PL 94-171 data, as revised, is December 15, 2021. In recognition of the challenges to state and local redistricting timelines, the Census Bureau announced in mid-March that it would release an interim data product (“legacy format summary redistricting data”) for the 2020 Census on August 16, 2021. The announcement noted that such data requires states to have particular expertise, and “any state using legacy format summary redistricting data files would have to accept responsibility for how they process these files".
According to a March 26, 2021 letter by the California Legislature to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, the Statewide Database has confirmed that this interim release is exactly the same data as the PL 94-171 data, only in a more complicated and less refined format. The Database has concluded that this interim product will meet their needs, with additional time needed for processing the format, estimated at two weeks.
Including the task to adjust Census data for incarcerated persons and electoral data to aid compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act, it is estimated that it will take about six weeks to make the redistricting data available for use by the state and local city, county, and special districts. We are therefore estimating that final version of the redistricting data will be available to Santa Cruz County by early-mid September. Preliminary redistricting data, prior to the apportionment of the prison population made be made available in late August.
Once the data is available, data tables of population by supervisorial district and the Esri Redistricting software to make redistricting maps and plans will be available on this website.