Gregory Roberts posts on the P-I's Strange Bedfellows blog on a public opinion survey commissioned by the King County Council:
[King] County has considerable room for improvement," is how the Elway Research report on the survey puts it. On "performance measurement and reporting," 71 percent of the respondents gave the county poor marks. For "citizen engagement," the figure was 64 percent; for "customer service," 59 percent; and for "use of public money," 53 percent.That would be the outcome of Public Official of the Year Ron Sims helping to create wealth more efficiently. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 26, 2007 06:53 PM | Email This
"To conduct the survey, Elway and FLT Consulting interviewed a random selection of voters in each of the nine council districts, and then asked 31 in each district to participate, forming a demographically representative sample. Participants attended workshops where the polling took place, and were paid $60 each for their trouble."
I'm sure that if folks knew the county paid 279 people $60 bucks each to take part in a public opinion poll, the poor performance poll numbers would have increased to 75 percent.
Take King County's online poll if you can't make it to one of the forums, copy & paste this in your browser's address bar: http://www.metrokc.gov/council/budget/citizen_engagement.htm
Posted by: SweetnSassy on March 26, 2007 08:41 PMJust remember. The money we spend in Iraq in one week would build a solid gold viaduct....
Posted by: Facts on March 26, 2007 08:53 PMLoosely connected, but connected....
A little leadership should solve both problems.
Posted by: Facts on March 26, 2007 10:05 PM(And they would already have it if Iran and Syria would stop their covert operations. It's a shame that U.S. media fails to point to point out the real source of misery in Iraq is not the U.S. but hardline moslem nations.)
On the other hand, a solid gold viaduct would do what?
I personally believe that the whole viaduct problem could be solved for billions less than the proposals on the table, and I'm certainly not alone on that.
Posted by: Johnny on March 27, 2007 09:03 AMI find the whole idea of a survey preposterous. It doesn't reflect people who actually have contact with King County government. How many people, really, know anything about local or county government?
I don't know how this program was run, but assuming it was legit (and I don't), it would at best judge the perception of how King County is run.
Posted by: swatter on March 27, 2007 09:12 AMThere is no way all this was necessary. But if the county were building my house you can bet they would have done all this at a huge cost.
Take a look at some of their public works projects. 50% of the costs are engineering, and then 50% of the rest is probably unnecessary environmental work. So in fact I think we are paying 3x more than we need to be to provide basic protections to the environment.
Posted by: Burned on March 27, 2007 10:23 AMAs I think Burned points out in his post above, you only need to be a a "customer" of King County government for even a single property/building project to see there are problems with the way the process works here.
Try to get a building permit sometime - or work with King County to try to get a ruling on something concerning land uses - or do any of a 1000 of the things that a property owner in this area might have to do and you get a pretty good glimpse of the problem. The process is a sea of redtape and when you finally do get to someone with some decision making authority, don't be surpised at all if the path to what you want is often mined with expensive "side" projects that must be completed before you can get your own projects done.
(These "side" projects can be anything from expensive sidewalks that don't go anywhere and that aren't where people ever walk, tree plantings, fencing or culverts for no good reason, etc.)
I am not a "greedy builder" and I really do like trees and animals, but there is so much environmental red tape built into the process that it's easy to see the taxpayers rights are not a factor in the process. We live here too, but we seem to have less rights than all of gods other creatures great and small.
We taxpayers also seem to have less rights than the builders unions, every fringe "rights" group, the homeless, etc. If you don't believe that, you really are insolated from the true taxpayer experience.
Anyone that has dealt with King County knows in their bones that King County has grown inefficient because they have catered too much to everyone but taxpayers. Once you've dealt with them, it's impossible to believe that this who project isn't a porkbarrel already and full of hidden cost we've yet to see. (Can you say "big dig?")
Seriously though, unless the guy is caught with recyclables in his trash can, he's going to remain "king" of the county for some time.
Look at what he's done with things like Sound Transit and the elections and tell me again why this guy is still in office?
I'm afraid he's entrenched and there is no way to get rid of him unless he is elected to a higher office (shudder).
My points were these forms and surveys were given to people who have "no dog in the hunt". Those of us in the trades have lots of horror stories to tell, but again, this survey is only, at best, what the public perception is of the county. It is not any indication of the actual performance.
And your issues weren't so much about how the staffers performed, but instead, your complaint is all the rules and regulations.
Posted by: swatter on March 27, 2007 01:18 PMBut pleasant staffers aren't the solution that King County needs to fix their problems. When taxpayers believe that the city or county could build something for within 25 or 30% of the price of what a price company could do it for, that might be progress. And when I say that, I'm not picking on the unions or builders that do the job only - I'm also looking at the pr firms and legal firms that get hired, the full page ads in the Seattle Times for some of these projects to "pat themselves on the back" for their good intentions, etc.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that even if King County fixes all this, there will still be a lingering perception that there's a problem long after the problem has been fixed. (That's pubic opinion for you - it works the opposite of what happened during the time the problem went from minor to major and no one paid it proper notice.) But I think - and I know a lot of other people that work with King County a lot out there think - that any attempts to fix the problem are simply acts of moving around deck chairs on the titanic.
Posted by: issyblooper on March 27, 2007 02:42 PMBut pleasant staffers aren't the solution that King County needs to fix their problems. When taxpayers believe that the city or county could build something for within 25 or 30% of the price of what a price company could do it for, that might be progress. And when I say that, I'm not picking on the unions or builders that do the job only - I'm also looking at the pr firms and legal firms that get hired, the full page ads in the Seattle Times for some of these projects to "pat themselves on the back" for their good intentions, etc.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that even if King County fixes all this, there will still be a lingering perception that there's a problem long after the problem has been fixed. (That's pubic opinion for you - it works the opposite of what happened during the time the problem went from minor to major and no one paid it proper notice.) But I think - and I know a lot of other people that work with King County a lot out there think - that any current attempts to fix the problem are simply acts of moving around deck chairs on the titanic.
Posted by: issyblooper on March 27, 2007 02:43 PM