Last year, scores of citizens took the time to attend 10 community forums, dubbed “San Diego Speaks,” to provide input on budget priorities to the City Council.
Nearly 700 people also filled out a survey on what they see as essential services that should be protected from budget cuts and whether they are open to paying more for them.
But San Diego City Hall wants an even more clear picture of public sentiment. So the city is going to spend $24,000 to hire Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center to conduct a scientific survey of resident opinions on service levels and willingness to pay more or make do with less.
Even after closing a $179 million budget gap in December with a mix of cuts and fund shifts, San Diego faces a $77 million deficit in the budget year that starts in July 2011. City officials plan to use the findings of the survey to help them reshape budgets and consider ways to raise revenues.
“We are at a point where we are making fairly tough decisions,” Councilman Todd Gloria said. “We have to have some level of certainty on what people are feeling as we make additional choices on cuts, efficiencies or new revenues.”
Lani Lutar, president of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, said elected officials should not need a survey to help them figure out where their constituents stand and what approaches to take to fix the budget.
“The council has been holding hearings for months on feedback on budget priorities, I can’t imagine that they don’t have a good grasp of what the public believes its priorities are,” Lutar said.
Lutar is concerned that the survey would be designed in such a way that it would lead to biased results that are then used to justify tax increases.
“I think everyone knows you can have a survey tell you whatever you want it to tell you, because of how you might phrase the questions, because of information you may choose to omit from the survey or information you choose to include in the survey,” she said.
Councilman Tony Young, who chairs the council’s budget and finance committee, said the idea of conducting a scientific survey was suggested by a resident at a San Diego Speaks forum.
“You don’t do a survey to justify an end,” Young said. “I don’t want that. I want to find out really from the public what types of services they want and at what level.”
He emphasized that the latest survey will be scientific and based on a randomized sample of residents who are representative of the city as a whole. The prior survey was not scientific, as it was filled out only by people who attended San Diego Speaks and those who knew about the questionnaire online.
Gloria, a member of the budget and finance committee, also cited those reasons in explaining why he supports hiring a firm to do a survey.
“I do think people who come to public meetings are representatives of the neighborhoods they live in,” Gloria said. “At the same time, there are plenty of people who cannot attend meetings.”
Gloria hopes the survey will drill down to specifics, such as how many hours people want their public library open every week and how often they want their trash picked up.
The survey is touted as a critical component of a strategy to end the city’s budget-crisis cycle. While the survey is being crafted, City Auditor Eduardo Luna’s office is conducting audits on the city’s revenue sources, and the Citizens Revenue Review and Economic Competitiveness Commission is meeting to discuss ways new revenues could be raised.
Andrea Tevlin, the city’s independent budget analyst, said it’s not uncommon for cities to hire professional firms to conduct scientific surveys.
“The survey, for one thing, is structured,” Tevlin said. “You have someone walking you through the survey on the telephone. You are participating in choices, as opposed to at San Diego Speaks, where you are voicing your opinion on a particular program.”
The plan is for Behavior Research Center to conduct 600 telephone surveys in March and April. The questions are expected to be formulated by February.
John Nienstedt, president of Competitive Edge Research & Communication, a San Diego-based polling firm, said the city has legitimate reasons for wanting to conduct a professional survey.
“The squeaky wheel in the community gets heard more often than the famous silent majority, and to the extent that happens, a council member is kind of hamstrung,” Nienstedt said. “They are hearing the squeaky wheel, and the silent majority doesn’t get heard.”
The challenge, Nienstedt said, is for the city to design and conduct a survey that is non-biased and can be counted upon to accurately reflect public opinions.
“The budget process is a complex, messy political process,” he said. “To reduce it to a survey is fraught with problems. In view of that, it’s incumbent on the people who are producing the research, in this case, a pollster or polling firm, to do a really, really good job.”
