April Survey Looks at City's Priorities

By Edi Birsan

The Pulse of Concord is a monthly survey site that asks about 10 questions relating to issues in Concord. The topics are suggested mostly by the participants and often are constructed by them. The attempt is to ask the questions in a neutral manner so as not to bias the answer and to avoid questions that need a lot of explanation. You are welcome to post your suggestions here or send them to me at EdiBirsan@astound.net. 

This month’s questions include some rather simple straightforward questions, such as:

Schools should be grouped together so that K-12 is on one campus under one principal. (Rate from strongly agree to strongly disagree.)

 If there were a windfall of $250,00 annually in the city general fund, how would you spend it?  

The problem is that if you leave a question open-ended, then you get a paragraph of scattered words with many trying to say the same thing in different ways. That makes it very hard to summarize. So we listed 10 or so ideas and then left it open. The hope is that we can get a feel for the priorities. We had previously asked about those broad priorities and the first group of options is from those categories.  

This is an experiment in asking a question in that there could be a bias in the pre-selection of the 10 options, but this is how we all learn. How this will work out is going to be fun to watch. 

So why not jump in and give your input to the Pulse of Concord. Results of the monthly surveys are sent to those who want them, posted on various news websites and blogs and sent to The Concordian.