Metro councilors expressed support for the agency's Opt In survey tool at a Tuesday work session one year after the program's launch.
The program, which periodically polls nearly 11,000 of the region's residents, has been pitched by Metro staff as a way to get more input from the public, which traditionally have been reluctant to offer thoughts on the agency's policy goals. It also could be used for scientific polling if enough people sign up and participate.
In both cases, said Metro communications director Jim Middaugh, the effort will save Metro money. (Metro News is part of Middaugh's communications department.)
Metro spent $76,000 on Opt In in 2011, generating more than 20,000 responses – about $4.50 per completed survey.
By comparison, said a staff report for Tuesday's work session, Metro spent about $400 per open house attendee during the 2010 roll-out of then-Metro chief operating officer Michael Jordan's growth and policy recommendations; those numbers soar to $2,800 per completed survey at each of those open houses. The agency also spent $35 per attendee at the dozens of stakeholder meetings Jordan attended.
"We did a lot of work and it was very expensive," Middaugh said, "and we didn't get the (breadth) of feedback we wanted."
The panel is still far from perfect. Much of the discussion was centered around the underrepresentation of conservatives and suburban residents on the panel. It also under represents people who are Black and/or Latino, and is dramatically short on participants who never went to college.
That doesn't demean the project's purpose, said Rebecca Ball, an associate at DHM Research, which manages Opt In. She pointed out that of the 4,000 participants of a recent survey, 90 were Latino, 79 were Native American, 100 were Asian and 36 were African American.
"That's by far more than we would have gotten had we done a scientific survey," she said. "We have enough comments from these groups to look at them in a way that is meaningful."
Most of the council's discussion involved the nature of the new tool, and how it could be best used for them as elected officials.
Metro Council President Tom Hughes expressed concerns about the possibility of the tool undermining the elected officials' power to use judgment in representing their constituents.
"If we doubled the size of it now, it would still be a small slice of the population," Hughes said. "There is a tendency to say 'If 85 percent of people who responded to a survey said you ought to do X, and you did Y, what's the value of the survey? Or how come you don't do what the people told you they wanted?'"
On a similar track, two Metro councilors disagreed about the importance of offering breakdowns of survey responses by Metro Council districts.
Councilor Rex Burkholder said he'd like to see the district-based data, instead of the county-by-county breakdown now offered in survey results.
"The county boundaries aren't very good boundaries in terms of analyzing this data for us," Burkholder said.
But Councilor Kathryn Harrington said the councilors' charge isn't to vote for their districts.
"We are making regionally-based decisions," she said. "There are some folks who say 'You represent your district,' and yes – but I'm supposed to look at the regional context when I make those decisions."
Neither the council, nor staff, addressed recent controversies regarding the content of a January Opt In survey on transportation funding.