linked<\/a> from the Summit County website entitled, “We want to know your preferences and priorities regarding public land management within Summit County.” Fair enough, we use public land when we camp and hike (and many other times) so we thought we should give our opinion, and it reminded us of why we hate these things. What were the questions?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Question 1:\u00a0Rank these public land resource values in your preferred order of importance, highest to lowest, with 1 being the highest importance. The options\u00a0were things like protecting water quality, protecting natural resources, etc. So, that one made sense.<\/p>\n
Question 2:\u00a0On a scale of 1 to 10, how high of a priority do you feel the following resource topics are for county resource management planning?\u00a0This is where it started to go off the rails. The answers were things like mining, land use, land access, air quality, wilderness, recreation & tourism, etc. If we answer that recreation & tourism is a high priority, do we mean that we want more recreation &\u00a0tourism or do we mean that we want it managed more effectively? If we say wilderness is a top priority for county resource planning, does that mean that we want the county to take federal lands back and manage them or that we need to protect our wilderness more? It’s confusing.<\/p>\n
Question 3: Pick your top 5 resource priorities. There is then a list of things: mining, land use, land access, recreation & tourism, noxious weeds, etc. Of course, some of these are obvious. If you pick noxious weeds as your top choice, you want the county to manage weeds better. If you choose recreation and tourism, what does that mean? \u00a0We guess that you want the county make it a priority to do something related to\u00a0recreation & tourism. If you’re for an expansion of economic development in Summit County your understanding of that question is likely diametrically opposed to someone\u00a0who thinks development of Park City should have stopped in 1985. Bad questions.<\/p>\n
We could continue with the other 8 questions (some are better than others) but the point is that good surveys are tough to do. Another\u00a0point is that our local governments (Park City, Summit County, PCSD) shouldn’t factor in results\u00a0from anything less than a good survey. If the survey was from Survey Monkey (on the internet), you might as well go to the Hogle Zoo and find your answer.<\/p>\n
Finally, if a good survey has been done, and the results are guiding local governments, BUT THE SITUATION CHANGES, the results of that survey should no longer be valid. Let’s say that a survey was done that said we need more ice rinks. So a bond is passed\u00a0to build another ice rink; however, someone in Wasatch County announces they are building a skating facility and we know that a huge percentage of our current ice rink’s users are from Heber, do we still need to build an ice rink? It should factor in heavily and results of any survey saying we need more ice is likely is much less valid<\/p>\n
Likewise, maybe a survey was done 3 years ago that says that we need more aquatic facilities. Then, perhaps,the Basin Rec decides that they will add swimming lanes to the field house. That original survey’s conclusion is no longer necessarily valid for other decisions. If the county, city, and Basin Rec decide to jointly build another field house, should it include swimming? \u00a0Maybe or maybe not… but since swimming is now\u00a0planned for\u00a0the old field house, the results from a survey done before the facts on the ground changed, aren’t valid.<\/p>\n
Now, people may say results of a bad survey are better than nothing. “At least we know what some people are thinking” would be the claim. We completely disagree. Most of our local, government surveys involve a zero sum game. \u00a0There is only so much money to go around.<\/p>\n
We shouldn’t rely on the results of some random\u00a0survey or meeting to guide our local governments. We especially shouldn’t allow a survey with questions that could be interpreted in a \u00a0number of ways to guide us. The survey we saw today reminded us of that. \u00a0If a crowd gathered in 2009 and was\u00a0asked\u00a0“Due to the economic crisis should we do anything and everything possible to spur development around Park City?” Many people\u00a0would likely have said yes at the time. Would\u00a0that answer be called scientific? Does it still apply today?<\/p>\n
Likely not.<\/p>\n
And that is what\u00a0we fear from government surveys that are used to justify a course of action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We remember when we first started following the Snyderville Basin\u00a0Planning Commission, they were discussing an update to the General Plan. The General Plan guides…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6146"}],"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=6146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}