LAKE COUNTY – A report released this summer shows that, while the state's median income has dropped over the last year, local incomes remained steady.

The California Budget Project's report on income levels shows that in 2007 low- and middle-income Californians lost ground, with incomes declining across the state as poverty climbs.

The numbers, based on the California Budget Project's analysis, show a reversal in trends from 2006, which the group says was the first year since the beginning of the decade that California families have made significant progress.

“It took six years for low- and middle-income Californians to regain ground lost from the 2001 recession. But those gains were too little, too late,” said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan public policy research group.

Ross said the data show that the gains noted previously diminished as the state slipped deeper into a downturn.

The new data – which comes from the US Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population – show that California’s median household income fell to $55,734 in 2007, down by $1,154 (2.0 percent) from the previous year's number of $56,888 and down by $634 (1.1 percent) from its 2000 level, after adjusting for inflation. However, the declines are not statistically significant.

California's median income of $55,734 is higher than the median household income for the nation, $50,233.

Lake County's numbers, at first glance, appear to show an uptick from 2006 to 2007. However, Alissa Anderson, deputy director of the California Budget Project, reported that the changes in data for Lake County aren't statistically significant between 2006 and 2007 because of a very small sample size.

Lake County's small sample size also has resulted in one of the largest margins of error in data for any California county, based on the numbers Anderson provided.

For 2007, Lake County’s median household income was $40,946, with a margin of error that was plus or minus $7,371. Anderson said that means that there’s a 90-percent chance that Lake County’s median household income is between $33,575 and $48,317.

The county's 2006 median income was $37,628, with a margin of error that was plus or minus $4,540, giving it a range of $33,088 to $42,168.

In other statewide findings, the report shows that nearly 4.6 million Californians (12.7 percent) had incomes below the federal poverty line in 2007, up from approximately 4.4 million (12.2 percent) in 2006. Those numbers also are not held to be statistically significant, according to the analysis.

Children in California living with families with incomes below the poverty declined slightly between 2006 and 2007, falling from 18.1 percent to 17.9 percent. At the same time, California's rate of children living in poverty was 1.3 percent below the 2000 number.

In 2007, California's poverty rate was the same as it was in 2000, which puts it at 0.2 percent above the national average, according to the report. In 2006, the number of Californians with incomes below the poverty line had gone below the national average for the first time since the 1980s, the California Budget Project reported.

The concern now is that, according to recent economic information, Californians in lower economic brackets could fall farther behind in 2008, thanks to an unemployment rate that has increased steadily for more than 20 months and reached its highest level in a dozen years.

The California Budget Project pointed out that, as the job market weakens, more Californians are relying on the state’s income support and related programs to help make ends meet. Families enrolling in the CalWORKs, Food Stamps and Healthy Families programs has increased considerably during the past year.

Anderson said the current downturn points to the importance of having a strong safety net in place for families to rely on during tough economic times.

E-mail Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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