NORTHWEST : STANTON : Sorting Out Who’s In and Out of Town

Rand and Leslie Hogan have an Anaheim home address--in Stanton. They are not alone in this confusion.

Tucked into Stanton’s zigzagging border, which takes about a dozen jogs into Garden Grove and Anaheim, are residents who have no idea that they are official, taxpaying residents of Stanton, according to Mike Bouvier, the city’s planning manager.

For convenience’s sake, the Postal Service has given these pockets Garden Grove and Anaheim ZIP codes, even though they are pieces of Stanton. With the ZIP designations come corresponding Garden Grove or Anaheim mailing addresses, Bouvier said.

The twists and turns of Stanton’s boundaries are the result of what Bouvier called an “incorporation boom” throughout much of Orange and Los Angeles counties that began in the 1950s. In the decade or so that followed, the incorporations and land grabs left many area maps looking like patchwork quilts, he said.

About three square miles of real estate became Stanton when it incorporated in 1956.

Bad enough that residents are confused. Stanton Mayor Edward L. Allen wanted to make sure recently that the Census Bureau wasn’t. That could cost.

The bureau will soon begin its national census. That survey of age, income, residency and other statistics is the basis for distribution of billions of federal and state dollars to local communities. The more residents, the more money.

“I’s a significant issue,” said Rand Hogan, a member of Stanton’s Community Affairs Committee, a group of residents and business representatives appointed by the City Council to help promote participation in the upcoming census.

When a Census Bureau representative recently appeared before the Stanton City Council to ask cooperation with the head count, Mayor Allen asked how the bureau intended to sort through the mess created by the city’s erratic boundary. How would the bureau categorize a person who lives and pays taxes in Stanton, Allen wondered, but whose mailing address is in Anaheim or Garden Grove?

Fernando Tafoya, the Santa Ana district manager for the Census Bureau, assured the mayor that the system is designed to handle such circumstances.

Even before census questionnaires are sent to residents, Tafoya said later, census people canvass communities. Using current city maps, these canvassers mark the exact geographic location of each residence to pinpoint what housing is within which city boundary. From this door-to-door survey of “what’s actually on the ground,” Tafoya said, the bureau compiles lists that are cross-referenced to mailing addresses.

“When we mail the questionnaires, they go to the address provided,” Tafoya said, but in the tabulation process, the real city of residence is recorded.

“We have some other pockets” such as the ones in Stanton, he said. “The system’s set up pretty much to take care of them.”