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Barre City staff proposes resident budget survey to inform FY26 planning
Summary
City Manager Nicholas Mackenzie asked the council to approve a resident survey to gather priorities ahead of a February baseline budget meeting; councilors favored a short, accessible survey with ward/neighborhood breakdowns and protections to reduce response skewing.
City Manager Nicholas Mackenzie told the Barre City Council on Jan. 7 that staff plans to issue a resident survey to gather priorities and help shape the fiscal year 2026 budget.
Mackenzie said the goal is to have survey results in time for a baseline budget discussion at the council meeting on Feb. 11. "We'd like to get some direction from the council about where we should go," he said, and warned that much of the city's budget is fixed: "75% of our expenses are pretty much gonna be the same no matter what we do in this room."
The nut graf: the survey is intended to focus limited resident attention on discretionary services and trade-offs — for example, bulky-waste pickup, pool hours and cemetery maintenance — rather than infrastructure or personnel costs that are largely fixed by contracts and state rules.
Councilors and members of the public suggested design and outreach ideas. Councilor Guston and others praised a concise example in the packet (the Port Hope survey) as easy for residents to complete and useful for communicating priorities back to the public. Several councilors asked staff to include a geographic breakdown so results can be filtered by area; Councilor Guston specifically recommended presenting results by ward or neighborhood so representatives can see local patterns.
Residents and councilors also raised concerns about data quality and access. Manager Mackenzie and councilors agreed the survey should include a simple method to confirm respondents live in Barre City (or otherwise identify their relationship to the city) so results are not skewed by duplicate or out-of-area responses. Amy Galford and other participants urged a short, digestible survey and suggested paper copies or staffed sessions at the library for people who need help with online tools. Danielle, a resident who spoke later in the discussion, recommended exploring the Vermont League of Cities and Towns for help designing a statistically representative instrument.
Councilors discussed whether to restrict the survey to city residents or to collect parallel responses from business owners, workers and nonresident property owners. Mackenzie said staff can collect that information and then filter results so the council can view resident-only responses. He also said staff will explore survey tools that reduce duplicate responses without publishing private data.
Mackenzie said staff will prepare a draft survey and bring it back to the council; the target is to have results to inform the Feb. 11 budget baseline meeting.
Ending: Councilors agreed on the value of a short, well‑publicized survey with clear instructions about who should respond. Mackenzie said staff will draft language and outreach plans, including options for paper access and neighborhood-level reporting, and return with a proposed instrument for council review.
