Opinion: El Dorado County survey a joke
By Larry Weitzman
Money is so tight in El Dorado County that CAO Larry Combs recently decided that no general fund money will be used for roads in El Dorado County. But that didn’t stop our Board of Supervisors from conducting a Citizens Engagement Survey at a reported cost of $15,000 to “help” with determining a county strategic plan.
After several months of meetings, which included hundreds of hours of time of highly paid county officials, a 98-page detailed report of the survey results were released about three weeks ago. I happened to be on one of the committees, the Good Governance Committee, that tried to help work on the strategic plan’s other aspects. At the several meetings including the initial meeting for good governance I made the point that only six words were necessary to define good governance, not the government speak that is so often seen which consists of flowery politically correct whatever. Those six words are: “Absolute Honesty, Pristine Ethics and Complete Transparency.” As to strategic planning, I said probably 95 percent of the county populace wants three things: public safety, good roads and good land use planning. Those points were made directly to Laree Kiely, whose Kiely Group was hired to perform and administer this survey.
Larry Weitzman
The survey is replete with its own issues ranging from poorly designed questions to biased sampling. For such a survey, the sample of participants must be chosen randomly. During a university statistics course the one thing I remembered was for a survey to be valid it should be taken randomly and consist of a sampling of at least 1,256 participants. And that is where the problems begin.
El Dorado County has a population of 183,087. Survey takers totaled 2,228, with 2,119 living in EDC. Forty-nine are here part time and 53 claimed to be non-residents. That’s about a 1 percent participation rate. Of that sample 62 percent of the respondents were female. Almost 70 percent were older than 50.
At least two emails from an EDC official were sent to all other EDC county employees encouraging them to participate with a direct link to the survey. The result was that 20 percent of the survey respondents said they worked for the government, giving them a biased self-interest. On top of that, 187 of the respondents said they were educators — more government. That means these people were over represented by 250 percent based on population and people in private industry were under represented by about 65 percent.
El Dorado Hills, with a population of 42,000, had a total of just 300 respondents, where Placerville with a population of 10,000 had 393 respondents, weighting the Placerville respondents’ answers by more 500 percent over that of El Dorado Hills respondents. One of the other more important facts skewing the results is that you could take the survey more than once. I did. So did several other people.
Of the 98 pages, there were more than 50 pages of comments from respondents that also showed even more bias. A lot of the comments were from limited and no “growthers.” Another conundrum was the desire for higher paying jobs, yet the growth industries wanted from a preponderance of the comments were recreation, ag, tourism, telecommuting and “responsible” retail, or mostly low paying jobs.
Many respondents wanted a rural environment, some with no cars or at best electric cars, but this highlighted pull quote from page 15 perhaps sums up the dozens of similar comments: “Please work with the small county farmers in creating easier ways to have home based agricultural businesses such as raising chickens, selling eggs, organic animal raising, selling and consumption of those meats, as well as growing produce and selling that produce and products at small local markets.” Can you say Walden Pond? More high paying jobs? All of the above demonstrates why the data from the survey is basically bogus. But there is a surprise.
While the most important question of ranking county functions in order of importance was poorly written — 12 choices were given, but you were not allowed to give any or all of them a zero, which skewed the results. The question should have had the 12 choices individually ranked from 0-10, so you could rank them if you wanted three 10s and nine zeros). Notwithstanding, the top three in order of importance were public safety, roads and land use. Perhaps they should have paid me for my advice. Unfortunately, most people look at free advice worth exactly that, nothing.
The respondents also commented extensively that government needs to be honest and transparent.
Comments also demonstrated that the county should be their mother and father and provide all kinds of free service, health care, cheap housing, lots of public transportation, more bicycles (great with all our hilly terrain), cheap, healthy (organic) food and other items, none of which even should be a county issue. One interesting incongruity was when asked: “What county services most impact the quality of your life?” The top answer was the library and by a large margin, yet it ranked eight out of 12 in importance of county services.
So what was the real purpose of the survey? It looks like an attempt to justify the expansion of government. It could also be an attempt to create a diversion from how bad a job the BOS and its administration are doing. The survey has little, if any, scientific value. But notwithstanding, the survey as “unbalanced” as the respondents were, validated that the No. 2 job of the county is take care of the roads to which the CAO, Larry Combs, (which the BOS approved) said that’s one item for which no general fund dollars will be used. What’s the purpose of the survey then, biased or not? But making matters worse is our expanding county government employees making more money than ever in salary and benefit. To hell with the roads.
News flash: Confirmed by Combs, he advised his staff a few days ago that he was going to hire his loyal friend for the position of assistant CAO. Shawne Corley, who is currently ACOA of Sutter County, is where Combs spent about 25 years. This is exactly what I said in my last column in the last paragraph, Combs will hire his friends and play the game of government musical chairs, the game where government employees never lose. Sounds just like Terry Daly hiring Kim Kerr and our continuing feckless BOS. How history doth repeat itself.
Larry Weitzman is a resident of Rescue.
Larry-
I disagree that the survey is worthless. I do agree that it seems to have been poorly designed, but in my experience most surveys are, unless they are are very small and focused on a small issue. This survey seems to have fulfilled its goal to justify the status quo, and hoping it is not widely read.
I am not at all certain that you are qualified to make the criticisms you have made, and your general rants are what the problems are, not particularly how to resolve them except get all new administrators. On this we can agree.
It is not a surprise that people want to live in a rural environment and still have high paying jobs. Our entire culture is conflicted with wants leading needs and always somebody else is supposed to pay for it.
One oddity in your article I saw.
I have never seen “telecommuting” referred to as an industry. How does telecommuting really benefit the County in a growth way since a telecommuter gets paid, by definition, from some company NOT here.
As a Tahoe resident, I clearly see the downhill bias to most all decisions made. This is going to be the case always since the population is so skewed toward the foothills. I have no data but from living here for 30 years, I know that the bulk of residents are definitely a the bottom or off the bottom of middle economic class. Our own supervisor can’t even vote on a lot of the things that need attention up here due to her own business interests. Why did we elect her? This was not adequately disclosed in the campaign.
I have little hope that this entire eldo county situation has any resolution and fully expect the County to be teetering on the cusp of bankruptcy soon, and probably is already.
We recall taking the survey and being forced to assign positive numbers to unwanted and unnecessary services which we wanted to rank “zero”, or the survey would not let us submit.
The results should be tossed out and ignored. A waste of $15K.
This is simply another example of the incompetence at most levels of government today. It is patently obvious that our government workers, including and especially leadership, is unaware of the everyday American life. They are clueless, and worse, they think that they can “fake it”. Of course, telecommuting is not an “industry”. It is a method to avoid commuting. One of the oldest tricks of politicians and marketers is to rename things. It allows them to avoid the unpleasant aspects of issues.
Identity politics has blinded many in our country to the reality of this incompetence. When a politician is of a particular stripe, all offenses that they commit are forgiven without any expectation of change by their supporters. This phenomena allows them to get away with practically anything without consequences. We call this the “good old boy network”. It is everywhere. The County has been running in the red for entirely too long without remedy, but they still waste our money on studies, consultants and pie-in-the-sky ideas.
All Americans want is responsible leadership that treats our money like they would treat theirs and spend taxpayers’ dollars wisely and frugally. Is that really so difficult or too high of an expectation?
Michael…”Is that reality so difficult or too high of an expectation”?
No it is not, however, viable, willing candidates are few and far between.
As Carl put it…the political climate is TOXIC
Mr. Weitzman, I agree that the survey may have been better designed and is of marginal use in forming public policy, but it’s shortcomings aren’t because of a too small sample size. Although there are 183,000 EDC residents, there are only 67,900 households. Without knowing the number of households that received a survey, it is impossible to calculate its statistical accuracy. But a resident response of 2,119 (3%) is very strong and probably indicates a margin of error of less than 3%.
There is no fixed number for a survey response to be accurate — the claim that a response of 1,256 for a survey to be valid is wrong. If that were true, surveys couldn’t be held in populations of less than 1,256.
Also randomness isn’t essential or even desirable. The 2,119 who returned their surveys represent a high percentage of those who care about the county’s strategic plan — most residents don’t. Consequently, they are uninformed and shouldn’t be involved in the planning process. It’s why political polls are always qualified by: “Those likely to vote.”
I agree that good governance should have: “Absolute Honesty, Pristine Ethics, and Complete Transparency.” However, it’s simplistic to say that “95 percent of the county populace wants [only] three things: public safety, good roads and good land use planning.” I would argue that most would also include the maintenance of good education and health and human services.
As Larry mentioned some background in ‘probability & statistics’ -[from a “university statistics course the one thing I remembered was for a survey to be valid”] – , my recollection from those studies is also that a survey’s outcome is dependent on what is actually asked – making his assessment the political determinate that it is, as the questions to be asked are no doubt “run by” someone before it is even sent out.
This brings to mind the resurrection of the seminal concept G.I.G.O.- (Garbage In, Garbage Out) – as any result can be no better than the information “put in”, whereas many can & do wonder about what “comes out”.
And, as Mr. Clark says “they are clueless, and worse, they think that they can “fake it”. . .”, which is quite often the outcome of thinking that no one will know the difference, the very reason for any subsequent ‘needed’ political spin. . . ‘Transparency & trust’ due to having to satisfy one faction over another is then lost, as is credibility, as no one really respects the idea of integrity anymore – just whether a decision is made in one’s favor. . .the problem in EDC seems to be with the county structure itself, demanding as it does that “the way we do things around here” must prevail, as that appears to be the only thing that drives it all.
An outside observer could decide that the ‘County’ has blinders on, as it is so obvious to many of the increasing dysfunctions, without acknowledgment by the very “personifications” that cause them. . .
Academic qualifications mean nothing if one still lacks common sense, which is not often itemized as the 1st item it should be, in being an adequate proxy for integrity, but not for needed critical thinking. . . which has, at its core, a built-in ‘critique’ beyond the superficialty of today’s politics. . .
Larry,
If you don’t like El Dorado County and the people that are elected then MOVE.
Steve and Gary…You two write volumes of fancy language and expound your statistics with a snicker and a sneer at all those, uneducated IQ 100 people raising families, paying taxes and then act snooty and superior when nobody understands what your ‘qualified’ blah blah is on about…really…well
Herman Cain…”Numbers do not lie, but people that LIE use numbers.”
‘Academic qualifications mean nothing if one still lacks common sense, which is not often itemized as the 1st item it should be, in being an adequate proxy for integrity, but not for needed critical thinking. . . which has, at its core, a built-in ‘critique’ beyond the superficialty of today’s politics. ‘
Run-on sentence.
Robin. Why do we have to put up with the opinionated dribble of “Larry Weitzman.”
I suggest you do a google search of Mr Weitzman for yourself since my comments are being censored.
just type ‘larry weitzman meth’ in your favorite search engine and enjoy …
My. Urie, The CAO of Eldorado County has nothing to do with education.
Larry Weitzman is a self-serving wind bag….get a life.