To 'satisfy,' limit those surveys

Less is more… Let’s hope that’s what the Prince William County Board of Supervisors takes away from its recent move to cut the frequency of its so-called “citizen satisfaction surveys” from annually to once every two years. In our view, even a biennial survey may still be a bit much.

This yearly sampling of county residents on how satisfied they might happen to be (at least when questioned) has always seemed a bit self-indulgent. Theoretically, yes, it’s certainly nice to know our county of­ficials care enough about our feelings to at least ask.

But somehow all this yearly citizen feedback — at least the positive data — seems to find itself continuously re-purposed for an array of county government press releases, special reports, citizen notices and/or other venues of “official county communi­cations” that (like the surveys) are also usually paid for with tax monies.

In the end, the surveys devolve into a great big pat-on-the-back to the county from the county.

The board’s reason for cutting the satisfaction surveys back to every two years, as usual, is to save money.

Last year’s round of citizen queries managed to break the bank at around $90,000. In fact, recent surveys have gone well over their allotted annual budgets ($50,000) for the past three years.

Consequently over the next four years the board figures it will save an estimated $280,000 by skipping the data-retrieval project in odd-num­bered years. Although that’s not a vast savings to PrinceWilliam in the fiscal scheme of things — for what these an­nual findings portend to accomplish (and especially for what it doesn’t) it’s a massive waste of money.

To us, this prudent board action achieves two distinct purposes: 1) it eliminates a needlessly repetitive and somewhat politically motivated activ­ity that provides no tangible benefit to citizens; 2) it simultaneously saves the Prince William taxpayer well over a quarter of a million dollars, to boot.

We suggest that perhaps cutting these satisfaction studies back to every four years might be even more beneficial for all concerned. That might allow county officials to ac­cess and gauge trends and shifting attitudes more definitively over a slightly longer timeframe. Any such quadrennial survey would be most useful if conducted in the year imme­diately following a supervisors’ elec­tion (i.e., 2012, 2016). Such a timetable could provide fresh post-election and satisfaction data to help build future county action plans. And a survey every four years will save even more tens of thousands of dollars.