Hot on the heels of October’s municipal election campaigns, at least two local municipalities could be spending thousands of dollars to find out what their residents are thinking.
View Royal senior staff are recommending the town spend an estimated $40,000 to undertake a telephone and online survey of between 300 and 400 residents.
The hope is to gather feedback on “core community values and shared goals” as outlined in the official community plan. Funding would come from casino revenue.
And Oak Bay district staff estimate it would cost $30,000 “to fund a statistically valid and reliable citizen satisfaction/priorities survey.”
It’s been almost three years since Oak Bay last conducted such a survey, and with a newly elected council in place it’s important that all voices — including the silent majority — are heard, says the Oak Bay staff report.
Elected officials regularly hear from individuals and groups on issues, the report says. “This is necessary and valuable feedback, but it is also important that council members hear the views of the broader community. The best way to learn the views of the ‘silent majority’ is through quality surveying,” says the Oak Bay staff report, which is to be discussed at a council committee meeting on Monday.
But the survey proposal got lukewarm support at best when it was discussed an earlier committee meeting in November with some Oak Bay councillors saying the Oct. 20 election was a major citizen satisfaction survey. Referring the report to a special budget and strategic planning meeting only passed on a 4-3 vote.
Oak Bay Mayor Kevin Murdoch doubts the survey proposal will survive as a stand-alone budget item but said some sort of survey may form part of the district’s strategic planning and budgeting process.
“It makes a certain amount of sense to have some sort of baseline that you do on a regular basis to get some sense of where things are at,” Murdoch said, adding that councillors “didn’t seem terribly receptive to spending that amount of money on a generalized survey.”
In View Royal, the survey is proposed to address “service delivery, quality of life, customer satisfaction, communications and public engagement,” as well as any area that council wishes to explore.
“A community survey can capture a snapshot of residents’ perspectives, shaping the town’s approaches to various initiatives and associated communications work as well as informing decision-making,” said a View Royal staff report.
View Royal Mayor David Screech said he supports the proposal. “It makes sense to me. I know it’s a lot of money but I think that given that certainly in all the years I’ve been on council that we’ve never done it, so I think it’s probably a good investment.”
View Royal staff say the telephone survey would probably take about 15 minutes to complete.
“There’s a feeling that we really need to go out to the community and get their input before we complete our strategic plan and hear from them on what we are doing right and what they would like to see,” Screech said.
