Research Request - 5311 Apportionment Formula

[KatrinaMKaiser]

Research Question

Single sentence description: Do the past 3 years of 5311 apportionments to regional bodies passing through Caltrans align with the stated formula? If not, how would apportionments change? How would apportionments change if allocations went directly to each 5311-recipient agency?

• Double check work done by Sara.
• Cross reference all available types of census data.
• can we use the census API to read in data to a notebook? AND apple the apportionment formula

How will this research be used?

Goal is to inform future 5311 pass through apportionments. Related in part to #1536 which is about informing 5310 apportionments.

Stakeholders & End-Users

Gillian and Sara

Metrics

• Translate the PDFs into a tidy data table
• Recreate the apportionments based on the stated formula
• If there is not alignment, identify why and how much

Data sources

• External data sources: PDF apportionment tables, emailed; FTA Census maps

• Remaining data source questions: What "rural census data" is being referred to in the formula? Where is population/demographic data coming from?

Deliverables

Potentially an exploratory notebook showing allocation over time and match/mismatch with stated formulas

Timeline of deliverables

ASAP

[csuyat-dot]

Had meeting on 10/1/2025. Discussed how stated rural populations values from do not align with any known/published rural population values. Need to confirm where these numbers came from with DOTP staff. Apportionments methodologies were "reversed-engineered" then re-calculated with known/published rural population values from 2020 Census. Re-calculated values were vastly changed for some counties.

in-progress work copied into sharepoint "5311 analysis" folder

[csuyat-dot]

Per Sara: try to reproduce the 2010 population calculation by add the urban cluster + rural population.

Try to see if there are other ways to find how to 2020 population calculation was performed.