Shasta County Analysis

All of the states in the U.S. have subdivisions of counties, or county equivalents in the case of Alaska and Louisiana. The amount of counties in a state depends on how much land there is in the state. Some have well over 200, like Texa, and some have five or less like Delaware. California, which only had 27 counties when it was first gaining statehood, now has a total of 58. One of the 58 counties is named Shasta, a medium sized county in the northern California area at the top of the Sacramento Valley. Shasta county was originally named Redding but was renamed by the legislature before being approved between January 4 and February 18, 1850 (“California Counties”), making one of the first 27 counties when California began its statehood.
It currently resides in both the 1st Assembly and Senate districts, both of which are currently represented by republicans. Shasta has only recently become a republican county, with a 62% majority in 2012, because before 1980 it had been a democratic county for the most part. An interesting thing is that, a side from Redding, the cities seem pretty evenly split with surprisingly high numbers of people with no party preference. It has five Board of Supervisors, who are mostly the executive and legislative authority in the county. In order of district it is: David Kehoe, Leonard Moty, Pam Giacomini, William Schappell, and Les Buagh. There are ten Shasta Superior court Judges. An interesting fact is that Redding has their own elected department heads of county clerk and treasurer, completely different than the Shasta county clerk and treasurer. Their school district has two areas, with three Board of Education members in area 1 and four in area
Census Bureau. It is important to note that there are only three fully accredited colleges, one of which is a 2 year college, and one Bible college. Perhaps understandably, NACo(National Association of Counties) states that unemployment is at 7.8% and with 14% of the population in poverty. There are three main industries of employment ranked by NACo are: education and health (22%), government (19%), and trade and transport(19%). They also indicate that there seems to be a job growth rate between 2014 and 2015 of 1.4%. Only about half of the population is in the labor force however, counting everyone above 16 years old. The average household income is about $44,556 with the average value of houses being $213,700. Out of 77,915 housing units, only about 60% of them are being used as of 2015. However, it seems houses in Shasta have a moderately slow turn over rate, since 80% of the population said they had lived in their house for over a