This evening (January 6, 2015), Sebastopol’s City Council will vote, probably unanimously, to waste $5.500 of taxpayer money for a meaningless public relations exercise designed as a survey. Meanwhile, taxpaying citizens will likely never hear a whisper about the significant policy decisions that our elected representatives will quietly make (or not make) in our name, with our tax dollars during the coming year.
Read for yourself the transparently rhetorical questions that Sebastopol's City Council is about to pay its $40,000 per year external PR consultant an additional $5,500 to ask our fellow citizens. (Scroll to page 4 to see the two pages of public relations slogans posing as survey questions on the City Council agenda website here)
The “survey” will ask us to rank, from 1 to 10, the importance of platitudes like “Maintaining Long Term Financial Sustainability.” Or would we prefer to prioritize “Economic Vitality,” or “Maintaining a highly qualified city staff.”
Ironically, I am the citizen who requested that the City council survey the public on meaningful policy issues as a means of advancing a “Gov 2.0” back channel to allow feedback on specific questions. Instead, we have public relations statements masquerading as questions—and costing us an additional $5,500 in PR expenses in the process.
I have created and written about surveys for decades. There is a saying in information gathering: “garbage in, garbage out.” Meaning that if you gather meaningless data, you will have no concrete usage for it.
Meanwhile, I can think of at least a half dozen pertinent questions that our Council Members will be deciding in the coming months, by themselves, without ever asking our opinions about them. This, I am sorry to say, is because they do not want to hear what we think, because they have already decided, amongst themselves and their small circle of political supporters, what their answers will be. The last thing, it seems, that they want to know is what We, the People, think of them.
Although these questions are never likely to come up in any city survey, the answers to them will directly impact the lives of most of us, or our City's budget. Conveniently for our secretive local government, they are unlikely ever to be reported in our obsequious local media.
Here are some real questions that our City Council’s PR survey will not be asking us:
The City is scheduled to spend $66,000 in taxpayer funds to purchase two new large gas powered trucks for our Public Works/Parks Dept. Sebastopol does not have a single all-electric vehicle in its large fleet. Should the city instead make one of these an all electric utility vehicle for use in our city parks?
Should the City create a ballot measure this year to provide the low income tax exemption that was promoted, but not included, in the expanded four new "utility" taxes that began as Measure R this year?
Should the City create a bike lane along Morris Avenue linking the two bike trails in and out of Sebastopol?
Should the City spend $500,000 on a fourth bay storage building for the fire station’s equipment, as it has already begun allocating reserves to build?
Should the City provide 20% pay scale raises (in addition to cost of living wages) to most of its managers?
Should the City reduce regulations to allow homeowners to add granny units to their properties?