by Bob Pinzler
During my eight years on the Redondo Beach City Council, I learned two things about evaluating. The first is to never attend a meeting in which the first item on the agenda is the date of the next meeting. That is assurance that nothing substantive will be done that evening.
The second was to avoid meetings called by someone whose only goal is to say that “they had heard from people with different views.” Their only purpose for arranging the meeting is to deflect criticism without having to alter their thinking on their position.
The head of a certain local special district is a master of the second kind of meeting. He has an extraordinary repertoire of non-listening “listening events.” They are solely held to tell the public that they have gotten a wide range of opinions, which they will assiduously ignore.
Then, there is the issue of public issue polling. Having spent a good part of my business career analyzing trends and dissecting changes in consumer attitudes, I know how to read a poll. And even more, I know how one can make a poll deliver the results the client might want to hear.
The general problem with the public reporting of poll numbers is that they never tell you what the underlying reasons for the responses are. That is why one often hears about the need of those studying the results to get into the details: crunching the data.
For example, if one were asked, “Do you think creating open spaces is good for a city?” the answer most likely would be yes. But if one were asked, “Would you be willing to pay for open spaces that you and your family would be unlikely to use?” that answer would probably be a resounding no.
So, when someone tells you a majority of the public would vote yes for something generic like “health and wellness,” the first necessary response would be, “Did you tell them the details?” For an organization looking for selling points to a skeptical public, the likelihood that they would ask that additional question (and, if they did, tell you the answer they probably would have gotten) is negligible.
It would be nice to say the public is not naive enough to buy what these people are selling to them, but, alas, they sometimes do. It is for those of us with a different opinion to at least let you know what the options are. An informed public is a powerful one. It is a core tenet of the type of government we live under.
The seller wants to circumvent that. It is our job as the voting public to not let them do that. ER
