The City of Auburn is preparing to send out its Citizen Survey to a sample of Auburn residents within the next month. The goal of the survey is to learn about residents’ thoughts on various issues in Auburn and to help the City Council make budgeting decisions, said City Manager Jim Buston.
“Basically, the Citizen Survey is geared to get the citizens’ feedback on how well their City government is operating,” Buston said. “This is not a political document. This is a document that helps us set budget priorities for the coming year.”
Questions on the survey range in topic from City schools and libraries to police and traffic flow. The City wants to ensure that residents get a good return on their tax dollars through available City services, Buston said.
The survey does not directly cover topical issues, instead looking for general trends over time.
“We have seen, in the past, a trend with traffic congestion,” Buston said. “In this last budget period, we had a City-wide traffic study done. We did a lot of work at different intersections downtown, which caused more traffic [during construction].”
The City has been conducting the Citizen Survey for the last 30 years, Buston said. The City typically has increased budgets in services that residents rate poorly. Every department in the City uses information from the surveys to improve internally.
The survey will have 35 questions, Buston said. Many of the questions will have multiple items.
Respondents will be asked if the issue in question would warrant an increase in taxes or a diversion of funds from another project.
It will also include questions about residents’ social and economic demographics in order to create an accurate representation of the City’s population.
These surveys will be mailed to a sample of residents who will then have the choice of mailing a completed form back or filling out the survey online.
Respondents will be asked to rate various City services, Buston said. There will also be an opportunity to voice additional opinions in a free-response question.
About 2,600 residents throughout Auburn will receive the survey. This sample size will ensure with 95% confidence that the responses reflect the general population. Additional responses would not change the data since it is of a valid subsample of the population, Buston said.
The survey creation and implementation is outsourced to ETC Institute, a national survey firm. This was done in response to concerns about biased questions in previous years.
“[ETC Institute] has to make sure the samples they’re getting in the City are geographically equally distributed,” Buston said. “We want to make sure we’re getting results from North Auburn as well as South Auburn.”
ETC Institute compiles ratings into census blocks, Buston said. The City will be able to see problems experienced in different neighborhoods but cannot identify which individuals completed the survey. Residents who receive a survey and do not fill it out will receive an email from ETC Institute as a reminder.
City Council will see the complete list of questions the ETC Institute created by the end of January, with the surveys being mailed out shortly after.
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