{"id":1739,"date":"2014-10-17T21:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T03:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.parkrag.com\/?p=1739"},"modified":"2014-10-17T21:42:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-18T03:42:00","slug":"county-needs-stop-using-old-non-scientific-surveys-basis-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/2014\/10\/17\/county-needs-stop-using-old-non-scientific-surveys-basis-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Summit County Needs to Stop Using Old and Non-Scientific Surveys as Basis for Future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Allegedly sometime in 2010 there was a meeting where about 200 people showed up and some portion of those people ranked what the most important to them in the Snyderville Basin. Since then, those results are periodically trotted out during meetings and in documents like our General Plan to show what the community&#8217;s &#8220;vision&#8221; is. Case in point, in our General Plan Phase 2 document, you&#8217;ll see the following on Community Vision:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.parkrag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/200sruvey.jpg\" data-rel=\"penci-gallery-image-content\" ><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1740\" src=\"http:\/\/www.parkrag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/200sruvey.jpg\" alt=\"200sruvey\" width=\"613\" height=\"440\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is then used to define what the community wants. Is there a problem here? Let us point out 3 things:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Not representative.<\/strong>\u00a0Having 200 random people attend a meeting and vote and to use that as any sort of survey makes little sense. \u00a0Valid surveys go to painstaking lengths to ensure that it is representative of the population. How many second home owners were there &#8220;voting&#8221;? What was the distribution of race? What ages were represented? What was the distribution\u00a0of income in attendance at this meeting? We might as well post a poll on summitcounty.org and use that.<\/li>\n<li><strong>4 Years is a long time.<\/strong>What were you doing in 2010? Has anything changed from when you voted (did you vote in this?)? Oh, Vail is here. Kimball Junction has expanded dramatically. The movie studio is being built. 1000 homes are coming online near Home Depot. We are out of the recession and building is coming back.<\/li>\n<li><b>This list no longer seems accurate.<\/b> \u00a0If this list is accurate then we should be able to cancel all our work on traffic, transportation, and the mountain accord. \u00a0The first traffic concern comes in at 9th (with mass transit).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the only list, like this, that concerns us at the Park Rag. Right now consultants are using whiteboards where citizens that attended a meeting on transportation put green and red dots next to concepts they agreed or disagreed with in order to chart our future course. An example is below:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.parkrag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/IMAG0383.jpg\" data-rel=\"penci-gallery-image-content\" ><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-1382\" src=\"http:\/\/www.parkrag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/IMAG0383-1024x579.jpg\" alt=\"IMAG0383\" width=\"700\" height=\"395\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There were over 120 people at this meeting and it was a great turnout. Ideas were expressed by the County and citizen feedback was captured. It was a very valuable meeting. However, we envision the results of the green\/red dot exercise being used to not only justify County ideas in the near future but for the next five years. Since we were at this meeting, we have a good idea of what&#8217;s wrong with this &#8220;survey&#8221;.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>While 120 people were at this meeting. \u00a0The maximum number of votes for any item was about 30 votes. \u00a0That would indicate that about only 30-40 people were voting.<\/li>\n<li>Even if 120 people voted, that would be far less than 1 percent of the Basin.<\/li>\n<li>Most of the people there were passionate about transportation problems. \u00a0How would people who really don&#8217;t have a beef with transportation vote?<\/li>\n<li>These votes are valid as of that one night in October 2014. \u00a0How valuable will they be next Summer? How about in two years.<\/li>\n<li>Some of the questions weren&#8217;t worded clearly for a Yes\/No vote. \u00a0People didn&#8217;t know what they were voting for.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>We get why the County does exercises like these. \u00a0It allows citizens to participate and share their feelings. \u00a0It has value, as far as showing what a limited number of people who are concerned with an issue feel at that moment. However, extrapolating results and using it continually, many years on is a disservice to our community.<\/p>\n<p>It makes us wonder in what other ways old data is being used to guide our future. \u00a0With so much at stake, Summit County needs to be better than this.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Allegedly sometime in 2010 there was a meeting where about 200 people showed up and some portion of those people ranked what the most&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}