As Mayor Todd Gloria has prepared his budget proposal for the next year, the city says its leadership has factored in a range of considerations for what to prioritize \u2014 including the results of a recent survey that led San Diego residents to give their own input.<\/p>\n
The survey, which launched in February and closed Friday, asked San Diegans to weigh in on which city services they care most about and which ones they would feel comfortable reducing, especially as the city faces a $146 million deficit for the coming fiscal year.<\/p>\n
It was the first time the city conducted a budget survey. But the survey, built by the city\u2019s Performance & Analytics Department, faced some limitations.<\/p>\n
There was no set limit to how many times a person could take it, although residents were asked to respond just once. It was technically possible for people outside the city to respond, though they weren\u2019t supposed to. And the city only offered it in two languages, English and Spanish.<\/p>\n
Some community members questioned how the results could accurately represent city residents and their different needs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSurvey data can sometimes be taken as the word, but it\u2019s not necessarily always reflective of what the full community is saying,\u201d said Erin Hogeboom, director of San Diego for Every Child, when the budget\u2019s first draft was released last month.<\/p>\n
The budget the mayor proposed last month included cuts to several services, including $11 million from arts and culture and reductions to funding for parks, libraries and youth services. He\u00a0is set to release his revised budget next Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The city closed the survey on Friday. It will share a final report of the responses with the mayor early next week before the revised budget is released, said city spokesperson Nicole Darling.<\/p>\n
By the time it closed, the survey received more than 13,000 responses from across the city, and just over 12,000 respondents included their council district. The largest share of responses, at about 2,600, came from District 3 \u2014 which covers the neighborhoods around\u00a0Balboa Park and downtown. It was followed by Districts 2, 7 and 1.<\/p>\n
The fewest responses came in District 8, which includes Barrio Logan, Grant Hill, Shelltown, San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, at 572.<\/p>\n
Respondents were asked about which city services they most want to protect. They could also identify city services \u2014 from parks and open space to homeless programs to graffiti removal \u2014 that they would feel comfortable reducing, on a scale of very unacceptable to very acceptable.<\/p>\n
The latest results through Wednesday show respondents are most concerned about poor street and sidewalk conditions, homelessness and housing costs. They want to protect street repairs and resurfacing, police and fire-rescue services from funding cuts, according to the city\u2019s survey data.<\/p>\n
Responses show that the biggest share of\u00a0survey takers \u2014 40% \u2014 prefer to see a mix of some service cuts and some new revenue to address the city\u2019s financial crisis. Slightly fewer, 37%, said they preferred eliminating some city programs to preserve others.<\/p>\n
Over 70% said they wanted to see new revenue come from hotel or tourism taxes. Just 15% said they want new revenue to come from additional parking fees.<\/p>\n
The priorities recorded in the survey, centered around the city\u2019s core services, haven\u2019t changed in the months that the survey has remained open, Darling said.<\/p>\n
But Bob Lehman, executive director of San Diego Art Matters, says he feels that the survey guided takers toward certain responses and didn\u2019t provide enough context about the impacts of cuts.<\/p>\n
The bulk of the questions listed groups of city services that survey takers could rate on whether or not they thought cutting funding for that service would be acceptable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt kind of shapes what your response is, when core services are listed alongside arts and culture,\u201d Lehman said. \u201cWithout any context, people are nudged towards protecting the obvious essentials.\u201d<\/p>\n
The city says the groups of categories were random and that there was no limit to how many times the survey taker could select one of the ratings on the scale for those questions.<\/p>\n
Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, said it\u2019s a good sign that the city has asked for feedback from the public, especially when big financial decisions must be made. But he stresses that analyzing the survey should go beyond the top-line results.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to be careful that it\u2019s going to be representative and \u2026 that you\u2019re looking at different age groups, different income groups and different parts of the city, to make sure that you\u2019re not missing any important details about how city services need to be delivered in times when the budget is in stress,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s survey included optional demographic questions, including a respondent\u2019s age, income level and race and gender. But Darling says the survey wasn\u2019t meant to be a \u201cstatistically representative sample, but rather a snapshot of resident perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the survey questions were optional. The only required response was a respondent\u2019s ZIP code, though the survey could be submitted with a ZIP code outside of the city limits. In late April, the city said that fewer than 1% of responses were invalid or from outside the city\u2019s ZIP codes.<\/p>\n
On its webpage, the city asked respondents to take the survey only once \u2014 but there was no way to prevent them from submitting a response multiple times, which the city acknowledges was a limitation.<\/p>\n
The city says the survey is just one of several factors informing the mayor\u2019s budget decisions \u2014 with others including legal obligations, economic conditions, departmental needs and the city\u2019s responsibility to maintain services like public safety, infrastructure and homelessness response.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe survey is one tool to understand how residents are thinking about tradeoffs in a difficult budget year,\u201d spokesperson Joya Patel said. \u201cIt does not drive decisions on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Mayor Todd Gloria has prepared his budget proposal for the next year, the city says its leadership…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":785672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,1370,728,8629,50,80,3549,7264,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-785671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-local-politics","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-san-diego","17":"tag-sandiego","18":"tag-top-stories-sdut","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116548142765082852","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}