In this entry, Benson Hill resident Kari Kopnick ponders the Renton Census that is required to get state assistance with annexation funding. Here is her journal entry:
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This is the information age, I know it. I am well past my 20s but I still have a facebook and a myspace. I play scrabble online with friends across the country, and keep in touch with my mom by email.

But I’m still a little skittish about giving out information about my family. Part of the Benson Hill neighborhood annexation to Renton involves a census. I got a letter a couple of weeks ago from the city advising us that a “census enumerator” will be coming to the door, wearing an official City of Renton badge with their name and picture on it. They have been charged to ask me my name, and the name of everyone who lives in my household. It’s for money, so the city can get funds allocated based on population increase. I get it. But still, I was a little uneasy when I heard about this.

OK, so what’s the big deal? I have a pretty public life. I work for a church and my contact information is all over the church website. I have a facebook with lots of information; even my political leanings. I know that technically that information is private, but I really I think if someone wanted it, they could get it.

Maybe that’s it. I wonder if the census information will really be destroyed after the verification process. I momentarily remember that during World War 2 when people of Japanese decent were held in concentration camps, one way that officials located the people was with US census information. And we are a mixed race family. My husband is a Korean American, I’m white, and our kids are like Barak Obama, Tiger Woods and Keanu Reeve—mixed race or what some mixed race Asian folks call hapa.

But this form doesn’t ask for race.

This census form (available online at rentonwa.gov) only asks for our names and a kind of survey of how much time we spend at our home address. “Do any of those listed above attend school and not live at the above address during the school year?” “Do any of those listed above sleep elsewhere more than three nights per week?” things like that.

Maybe my issue is with listing my kids. Maybe naming the people over 18 who live here is not a big deal, but writing down the names of the kids is unsettling.

But my kids’ names are on forms we send to the IRS and they are registered for school. It’s not like they’re flying under the radar right now.

So, I thought I should be a good citizen and do what the letter I got says to do if I have questions or concerns and call the person they list to call. I easily reached Glenn MacGilva, the person listed. He even answered on the first ring. And he was really friendly. Glenn is from the firm called Census Services that Renton hired to do the census of our area. He seemed maybe to be expecting that I was about to bite his head off, but I wasn’t. I really just wanted to know why the city needed our names. And I wanted to know what was going to happen once I gave our names over to his “enumerator”, the person that knocks on my door.

He told me that the state wants names so that they can be assured that the city is not just making up names to pad the numbers being annexed, which of course equals more money, and also to bar against inadvertent duplicates. When I asked why they can’t just do an average, you know say this many households usually have this many people so here’s the number. He told me that that would average out over a really big number of households, but given that we’re really dealing with neighborhoods, it can be very different; like a neighborhood with lots of empty nesters probably has a different average household number than a neighborhood with lots of families with young kids. Mr. MacGilva also told me that the state actually goes and does random checks with a name match, and that’s why it can’t really just be a number. That’s why they want a name.

OK. That I’ll buy. I can see the point there.

Mr. MacGilva told me if I had concerns about security of the confidentiality of my family’s names once they left my front door I should call a woman named Theresa Lowe from the State Office of Financial Management. So I did.

Ms. Lowe was also lovely to talk with, and even remembered in 1967 being at the Federal Office building preparing for the 1970 survey and hearing from people who had been profiled during World War 2 based on the US Census. Now that’s living history. She reassured me that with these annexation surveys the names are physically cut from the forms and shredded when they reach her office. And she also affirmed that there is no law that compels us to answer this census. It is important to get the best response to the census possible, so the state can provide the right level of funding. But it’s still voluntary.

So now, I don’t know!

Maybe I should just go live in a yurt on an island in the ocean where no one cares who lives there.

Yeah, I know. There would probably be a motor powered canoe that would putter up and someone would climb out, and they’d have a name badge and a clip board. And they’d want to know who lived in my yurt and how many nights a week we all slept there.

Yep, it’s the information age.

Kari Kopnick

So I just spent a few days back in the cold tundra that I used to call home. Before I made my home on Benson Hill here in Renton, I lived in Minnesota.

Minnesota is full of people who are a lot like Washingtonians. There are more Scandinavians back in the Midwest; less density of people in neighborhoods and less traffic and it’s really, really cold in the winter, but in both states the folks are nice.

I grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota in the shadow of the Mall of America. Well, where the MOA is now—back then it was an old baseball and football stadium—an outdoor one if you can imagine that. But now it’s a place where tourists flock to shop. And I really do think you can buy anything that you could possibly need there and a whole lot of things you would never, ever need.

This trip back I noticed that Bloomington is actually a lot like Renton. It’s an inner ring suburb, meaning it was one of the first places people fled the cost and crowding of the city for their own little home. It’s big, covering a huge amount of area. And Bloomington has a real industrial base just like Renton.

In both towns you go from the neighborhood that has new condos and quad homes to the old “war boxes” in a block or two. You have a nice downtown, although ours here in Renton is better, and we are getting some really decent shopping with the Landing—not a mall with an amusement park in the middle, but it has what we need.

When I was growing up a thousand years ago, Bloomington was the third largest city in Minnesota. As of January 1st Rochester, MN is the third largest.

Rochester feels like a smallish city. My family and I spent New Years Eve visiting old friends in Rochester.

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Well, we weren’t really visiting friends. We were visiting our Cheezeball family, they may not be related officially, but we bonded early on trying to catch those little crunchy “food product snacks” after a friend threw them for us. That was 20 years ago. We’ve been there for each other ever since, so it’s better than family. A whole passel of us made the trek to Rochester to celebrate the New Year and all our new beginnings.

The folks we know in Rochester moved to Southeast Minnesota for a job at the Mayo Clinic and are still there 10 years later.

Getting to Rochester from Bloomington is like driving to Olympia for us, except instead of driving thru what feels like one continuing city; you pass a million farmsteads, some of them still clearly producing crops during the 5 month growing season. And the terrain is flat like the ocean. Flat, flat, flat.

On New Year’s Eve, the Rochester town paper had a feature about how the City of Rochester was annexing some neighborhoods so they could provide services for the people there. Sound familiar?

The Rochester City Council has been talking about annexation since the 90s. And it was all voluntary. Not everyone is happy about it of course. That’s how things go. Some folks think things were just fine as is. But like here in Renton, the services were really needed. People needed one place to call to get their city related issues handled.

And like it will be here in Renton, things are changing.

Like building the Mall of America right where Minnesota Twins Star Harmon Killebrew hit homeruns.

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And like the super fancy boutique stores going in where there used to be five and dimes.

And even like having a Starbucks just about everywhere you can want one in my hometown now; including Target. I’m not complaining. I’m just noticing

The times, they are a changin’.

Now I have to go listen to some Bob Dylan.

Happy New Year!

Kari Kopnick