Sechelt Mayor Bruce Milne defended his council’s decision not to release the results of an online citizen satisfaction survey this week, saying the information is invalid because of the way the survey was set up.
The online survey was undertaken as an add-on to the telephone survey conducted by Innovative Research Group in November of last year.
“Staff wanted to know if they could save money in the future by doing surveys online rather than hiring consultants and pollsters with experience on telephone ones,” Milne told Coast Reporter this week.
He said staff set up the online survey with assurances that it couldn’t be taken multiple times.
Questioning staff’s assurance, Milne said he had a friend who was able to complete the survey 14 times in November. After that, Milne said he waited for the responses to be compiled by staff.
A total of 132 online survey responses were compiled and put online in February, but were taken down moments after Milne saw them. “When I saw them posted online and looked at the first comparables on the age, gender, demographics and location, I asked that they be pulled so we could look at them,” he said.
Milne said he immediately questioned the results because they were “very, very different” from the telephone survey, which brought in 301 responses.
“The next thing that made me wonder what was going on was there was an email that crossed from Mr. Graham Moore, who’s pushing this pretty hard, who actually wrote to [communications coordinator] Connie [Jordison] and said ‘when are these going to be released? I’m sure they’ll be very different than the telephone survey.’ Well, anyone who knows anything about social science should assume that they’d be identical or very close or plus or minus five per cent,” Milne said.
“That’s when I went back and asked some people what’s been going on and you can see that there’s a group of people who took this as an opportunity to compromise an attempt by staff to get an online survey. I am not in any sense encouraged or interested in furthering their agenda and their aims.”
Contacted this week by Coast Reporter, Graham Moore denied trying to compromise the survey or organizing any group to do so.
“I posted it on Facebook saying ‘here’s your chance to speak up, if there’s anything you don’t like you can put it in there,’ but that’s the point of a survey, right? To put good or bad things on there,” Moore said.
“I did not orchestrate anybody to put anything negative on there.”
Moore’s Facebook post in November linked to the online survey and said, “Angry that Mayor Milne is ignoring young families, not creating good employment opportunities, turning Sechelt into a retirement community and not bringing in tourism dollars? Then have your say and more on the District of Sechelt survey to let them know your feelings!”
While the results have not been released, Milne noted at a recent council meeting that a large number of respondents reported a poor quality of life in Sechelt, which was a different result than the telephone survey showed.
Moore argues the different results are simply due to the different people who took the online survey, many of whom weren’t contacted for the telephone survey. “I think the online has a better way of going out to people. Who chooses the people they phone? If you put it online it’s there for everybody, so I think that’s a better, clearer way of getting an unbiased opinion from the community we live in,” Moore said.
“I want to see the results because I think it will be a more realistic outcome of the survey.”
But Milne said those results won’t be released because the online survey lacked sufficient filters to stop people from taking it more than once and responses couldn’t be limited to only Sechelt residents.
“We see this no different than if there is a draft report for finance and after looking at it, the finance officer realized some of the numbers had been added up wrong or there was misinformation in it- – he wouldn’t release that report, he’d fix it and then continue on. You don’t want to release drafts,” Milne said.
He noted council uses the citizen satisfaction survey results to make budget and service decisions, so they have to be a verifiable snapshot of what the community wants.
In this case, doing an online citizen satisfaction survey was a mistake, Milne said. “I think local governments want to work online in some way and they want to encourage a broad spectrum of responses, but they always have to be concerned about lobby groups. It’s no different than when you go to a public hearing and there’s lobby groups, but we can see that, it’s visible,” Milne said. “We can make our decision and balance that. So we have to be able to find ways to balance anonymous information or eliminate the anonymous element to it.”
While the district has released an online statement as to why the results won’t be released, Moore is still pushing to see the online survey responses.
He filed a freedom of information request on March 5 looking for the information, 10 days before staff admitted the results were likely skewed and asked council whether or not they should be released.
Moore was told on March 20 by corporate officer Jo-Anne Frank that the information would be forwarded to him in the “next couple of days,” but in a follow-up email from the district on March 23 he was forwarded council’s statement as to why the results wouldn’t be made public.
Moore has now made a formal complaint with the B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner, in an effort to get the results released. If he can get them, he plans to post them to social media sites.
“A lot of people took the time to fill in this information as a way of communicating their thoughts and feelings on how the district’s run, and so I think that should be released,” Moore said. “Just because [Milne] doesn’t like the results doesn’t mean he should withhold them.”
