See also:  FM3 survey: Putting a sales tax increase on the November 2024 ballot, and more

The City of Arcata is currently evaluating how to raise additional revenue in order to pay for needed City services. At the Council’s April 2, 2024, goal-setting study session, these results were presented by Miranda Everitt of the FM3 Research — with a very sparse audience in attendance. The video of the presentation is below.

I believe that to present the results of this survey at the Council’s annual goal-setting session, rather than at a regularly-scheduled City Council meeting, was an error. In the interests of transparency to the public, this survey should be promoted, not hidden.

The results of this survey, as presented by Miranda Everitt, are in the video below. The presentation is about 23 minutes long, followed by questions and discussions by the City Council for about 15 minutes.

The slides from the results of the $38,700 survey can be seen here on Arcata1.com, along with additional commentary.

Issues with this survey

• Many questions on this survey show a large degree of bias in the wording. Accordingly, certain results cannot be considered trustworthy.
• The purpose of the survey, as stated in the contract, was “for public opinion research on potential tax measure(s).” And yet there were two decidedly non-tax-related questions that were inserted into this survey: One on building height, and a multi-part question on development in Commercial-Mixed areas of Arcata, and what people would like to see there. The question is:

  “Increasing the allowable building height from four stories to a maximum of seven stories to increase the availability of housing affordable to working families while protecting open space.”

  What is a question on 7-story building height doing on a tax-increase survey? And who is going to be opposed to “housing affordable to working families”?

  Suppose the question had been worded “to increase the availability of market-rate rent housing to students and other single people“? We can be certain that question would have elicited a different response.

  As it is, the survey results for increasing building heights to seven stores “to increase the availability of housing affordable to working families” received only a 51% support — hardly a ringing endorsement, and well within the survey’s margin of error of about 5%.

• The other non-tax-related question was a multi-part question on the types of uses of space in the commercial areas of Arcata: Street parking, Sidewalks, Retail shops, Housing, Bike lanes and trails, Parking lots, Restaurants.

  “Housing” came in first, with 84% of the respondents supporting that to some degree. In second place was “Sidewalks” with 82% — meaning that 19% of Arcatans believe that sidewalks are either not at all important or only somewhat important. To me, this does not make sense. Sidewalks are required in Arcata — and important. To have 19% of the respondents say that sidewalks are not important may indicate that they did not understand the question.

• On the questions on Street Parking and Parking Lots in the “commercial areas” of Arcata, 15% said that Street Parking was not at all important, and 25% said Parking Lots were not at all important. That is, 85% of the people said that Street Parking was Extremely important, Very important, or Somewhat important. And 75% of the people said that Parking Lots were Extremely important, Very important, or Somewhat important.

  And yet in the Conclusions section we see “Parking, whether in lots or on the street, is a low priority for Arcata’s commercial space.” This statement is not what the survey results show.

Video of the Presentation

Below is the video of Miranda Everitt’s presentation of the survey results. It is missing the first 41 seconds of her talk. A transcription of the first 1 minute 23 seconds of the presentation comes first:

“My name is Miranda Everitt. I’m a Senior Vice-President at FM3 Research. We’re a public opinion research and strategy firm based in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Portland that does work on ballot measures and community surveys across the state and across the country. And we set up a survey for Arcata, and I’m here to present results and [words not clear].

So, I will start by talking about our survey methodology and then talk a little bit about what we found. And then I’ve got some time to help illustrate the data points. So our methodology here was a dual-mode voter survey. That’s our most common approach these days, to reach people by landline, by cell phone, by text message, and by e-mail, and by postcard.

So basically every kind of method under the sun to collect interviews, either by a phone interview of the lab interviewer or online. And we were able to actually reach 567 voters in your community. That’s a really kind of astounding response rate, given the underlying sample size. Often for entire states we do 400 to 600 interviews. This gives us a really robust look at what your voters are thinking.”