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Birmingham pauses rollout of community survey for edits after commissioners request revisions
Summary
Consultant Cobalt presented a draft survey; commissioners and outside experts raised wording, scale and actionability concerns. The commission rescinded a vote to approve and asked commissioners to submit specific edits within about a week for staff and the consultant to incorporate.
City staff and consultant Cobalt presented a draft community survey intended to collect baseline resident feedback on services and priorities. The survey team said it would distribute a random mailed sample (paper with optional QR code) and keep random-sample responses separate from an open online version.
Commissioners and outside survey experts flagged items needing refinement: grammar and punctuation errors, overly broad or ambiguous questions (for example, transportation and parking items that lacked geographic context), whether some items should be rank-choice rather than checkboxes, and how to make responses more actionable for budget and policy planning. Consultant Will explained the analysis approach (linking satisfaction scores to overall satisfaction and cross-referencing willingness to pay with priority items) and cautioned against adding too many open-ended questions because of survey fatigue.
Given the comments, the commission rescinded a motion to approve the survey so commissioners could submit written edits. Staff and the consultant will circulate a revised instrument after collating commissioner comments; the commission requested feedback from commissioners within roughly a week.
What's next: Commissioners will provide edits to staff; the working group and the consultant will incorporate revisions and return a final draft for approval before mailing and random-sample distribution.
