The Land Use Coalition has learned that the County recently conducted what is known in the trade as a "push poll", designed to drum up last minute support for restrictions on building in the mountains, after the fact. "We believe the County’s timing of this poll is a deliberate attempt to skew the Slopes Advisory Committee’s findings regarding mountain building", states AJ Chamberlin, president of the Land Use Coalition. The Coalition this week released its own review of the Slopes Advisory Committee’s draft report to the Commissioners, which strongly questions the need for any further land use regulations. The Coalition also recommends a complete overhaul of the County’s Site Plan Review process, and more funds allocated to purchase open space in the mountains.

The Land Use Coalition is a nonpartisan Boulder County citizens group dedicated to good land use regulations and practices, balancing both environmental concerns and the rights of landowners to use their property.

The Boulder County Commissioner’s poll, costing Boulder County taxpayers $6200, asks questions which are "academically invalid" according to Kevin Vryan, Project Manager of the Center for Survey Research, based at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The Summary and Conclusions of Mr. Vryan’s report is attached, and the full report is available upon request.

Kevin Vryan, Project Manager for Survey Research at the Center for Survey Research (CSR) at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, reviewed the survey as an independent consultant (not on behalf of the Center for Survey Research or Indiana University, or as CSR Project Manager). Vryan did an item-by-item analysis, concluding that the poll "… suffers from some serious threats to reliability and validity, and possesses unnecessary biases that would taint any findings. It concerns me that data yielded from this poll may be used to determine public policy or affect public opinion."

"I imagine that those who commissioned this study wanted an accurate picture of the views of Boulder County residents on important community issues, but the data may end up reflecting what some biased wording led respondents to say as much or more than what people actually believe and feel. There is no way to eliminate these threats to validity from the data already collected. The only way to ensure valid data would be to modify the questionnaire and conduct another poll using the highest of professional standards."

"The misuse of polling and ‘statistics’ (as poll results are often called) has led to public skepticism regarding the value of survey research. The possible misuses of the data collected via the Boulder County Questionnaire are far too numerous for me to detail here. While I am a professional survey researcher myself and believe in the promise of polling, I would have to count myself as among those who are appropriately skeptical of any data resulting from the Boulder County Questionnaire in its current form."

Closer to home, the Coalition asked Sean Evans, a University of Colorado doctoral candidate in political science who has designed and helped design political research tools, to evaluate the poll. Mr. Evans echoed Mr. Vryan’s concerns: "If the purpose was to get a representative sample of Boulder citizens’ attitudes, it is not a good tool," said Evans. The poll fails to provide for gradations of support or opposition – a respondent should be able to choose among at least 5 different levels of opinion, instead of just yes or no -- and thereby forces people into taking a position that they might not actually take in support or opposition of an issue.

Several questions are "rigged" in the sense that the question itself suggests the answer. For example, questions such as: "Do you feel a landowner should or should not be able to build a house where they want even if the site selected resulted in the following outcomes: …The access road to the house would create a significant new scar across a mountainside." The word "scar itself has an obvious negative connotation".

The poll does not present the other side, or the cost, of taking certain policy positions, in order to see how far respondents might be willing to go for the sake of "growth management". For example, the poll asks only whether respondents "feel" the County should support objectives to "reduce impacts on wildlife" or "to keep development away from wetlands, or floodplains and other areas near streams". Nowhere does the poll ask whether a landowner who has bought and paid for property, paid years of taxes, should be denied building on the property.

Repetition. The poll asks many questions over and over, subconsciously telling people the "right" way to think about an issue.

Questions #23-25, while not bad questions, do not present both sides, as they should. The clear message is "Let’s you and I raise those people’s taxes to pay for open space". The poll again fails to bring up the other side of the argument, for example, "Do you think it’s fair that mountain residents pay twice for the cost of open space?"

"Double Taxation" for Mountain Residents

The poll’s questions suggest that, in addition to the already existing sales taxes collected for open space purchases, the County intends to propose a separate mountain district be created to fund the purchase of mountain open space. The Coalition believes that taxing mountain residents for mountain open space is inherently unfair for two reasons: 1) open space in the mountains benefits all the citizens of Boulder County, not just those who live in the mountains. Flatlanders -- who look at the mountains, drive in the mountains, and those citizens who wish to support government policies that leave mountain property undeveloped, all benefit from mountain open space; 2) The Land Use Coalition strongly supports a County policy committed to allocating public funds from county-wide sales taxes specifically to the purchase of mountain open space, not primarily for "buffer" zones on the plains (the current priority for Boulder County Open Space). Buying landowners out, rather than misusing regulations to halt building, is the appropriate remedy.

If the County is unwilling to put its money where its mouth is, i.e. allocate funds for mountain open space, then the County should allow the 1500 or so landowners in the mountains build their houses without undue harassment and interference through illegitimate land use regulations. These are not Richman Homes developers, these are for the most part, individual, isolated individuals who wish to build their homes on their property.

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