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Pitkin County to use national community survey instrument, board debates custom questions and targeting

Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners · January 14, 2026

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Summary

County communications recommended adopting the National Community Survey via Polco for 2026 to enable benchmarking and longitudinal tracking; commissioners discussed custom geographic splits, question wording and use of follow-up prioritization tools.

Pitkin County communications staff recommended on Jan. 13 that the county adopt the National Community Survey (NCS) instrument administered by Polco for its 2026 biennial community survey to improve benchmarking and longitudinal comparability. The proposal includes mailing roughly 4,000 surveys to yield a ~5% margin of error and supplementing mailings with online options and targeted follow-up engagement tools.

Polco’s director of survey research explained that the NCS is a standardized instrument used by hundreds of communities and allows Pitkin County to compare results nationally and with similar resort communities. Adopting the national instrument would retain trend-line questions while freeing limited custom-question slots to focus on issues the BOCC wants to track (for example, local priorities, communications preferences, or specific funding/tradeoff simulations).

Communicators and the board discussed potential customizations: parsing by BOCC districts, school or fire districts, ZIP codes, or other geographic subareas; ensuring 'not applicable' replaces some 'don't know' responses to improve interpretability; and using Polco’s interactive tools (including a budget-prioritization simulator) for deeper follow-up engagement. Polco staff noted the survey package includes dashboards and an option to continue engagement during the two-year contract.

Board members debated question length and utility: some urged a shorter, more focused instrument to lift response rates, others pressed to preserve longitudinal questions that inform strategic priorities (for example, housing and growth). Commissioners also requested to see a cleaned draft of the full NCS questionnaire with localized parenthetical edits (for instance, removing references to irrelevant modes such as subways) before the county finalizes its custom questions. Communications staff proposed returning with a cleaned draft to the BOCC for review during a future meeting.