SCARBOROUGH — Having selected a survey vendor, the town of Scarborough will begin work with ETC Institute to create and conduct a community-wide survey this fall.
The Scarborough Town Council approved the recommendation of the communication committee to hire the Kansas-based company on July 21. Councilor Ken Johnson, chair of the committee, said that there were three vendors who had put out bids to be the town’s survey vendor, and the committee members unanimously voted to recommend ETC Institute.
In May, the council had given the committee approval to begin a request for proposal process in order to conduct a town-wide survey that could assist with policy-making decisions in the future.
“The survey will cover citizen satisfaction on a variety of Town services, including the condition of streets and sidewalks, library services, police response time, and more,” Johnson said in the Council Corner column in the Aug. 6 Scarborough Leader. “We also seek to learn more about overall satisfaction with the quality of life in Scarborough, cost of living, etc. These are questions that were asked in a limited service-satisfaction survey in 2010, so results can be benchmarked against past data. Other topics covered will be relevant to current Town issues, like a library expansion, consolidation of primary schools, or adding a community center. There will be opportunity for open ended questions to ensure your opinions and comments are heard.”
According to the meeting materials, the fiscal impact of the agreement with ETC Institute is over $21,000 before negotiations, and Johnson said at the council meeting that the company came in under budget.
“Their real strong suit is municipal surveys. In the last five years they’ve done over 700,” Johnson said. “Looking forward to working with them.”
In ETC’s proposal, the company said it will design a sampling plan based on the results of 600 surveys, Johnson said. A paper survey will be mailed out to 4,200 homes that are randomly selected.
“The goal of the survey is to capture the opinions and comments of as many Scarborough residents as possible,” Johnson said in his column.
“The communications committee is going to make every effort to get the survey in the hands of everybody in town that wants to be involved,” he said at the meeting. “So you’ll be hearing more from that. We encourage everybody to be involved. Town council wants to hear from you.”
Councilor Jon Anderson thanked Johnson for his leadership on the project.
“This has been something he’s been very passionate about, and it’s really great to see the company that we selected to come forward because I think that not only do they have a really interesting methodology and approach that will help us be more targeted in policy decision making once we have the results. I think they also have some very creative and technical ways that’s going to give us data and info through dashboarding, benchmarking, things like that that are going to be really impressive for us to be able to really understand the sentiment of the town,” he said.
The communications committee has made strides in improving the town’s engagement with the public, said Councilor Don Hamill.
“We’re going to put our money behind things that we think are really going to add value and improve engagement and participation of the public,” he said.
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