See also:  

• FM3 survey: Putting a sales tax increase on the November 2024 ballot, and more
• Video: FM3 sales-tax survey at the Council’s goal-setting session — with questions on building height and parking desired

The annual City Council goal-setting study session took place on April 2, 2024. This meeting was not televised, available on-line, or video-recorded. There is a rough audio recording, available on Arcata’s website’s meeting calendar page and available here, below.

This meeting also had a presentation via Zoom from Miranda Everitt, Senior Vice-President of FM3 Research, on the results from the City survey on a sales-tax initiative for the November ballot, plus questions on 7-story building height and commercial area uses in the City.

Audio of most of the meeting

Starts with oral communications. The video presentation of the survey results starts at about 6 minutes and runs to about 44 minutes. Following that is the goal-setting portion of the meeting.

Video of the Survey 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.”