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Council debates trimming 2026 community survey; consultant recommends testing sales‑tax messaging
Summary
Minnetonka City Council and staff reviewed a 2026 community survey draft with consultant Peter Leatherman; the council approved cutting low‑priority items while testing targeted questions about a possible half‑cent local sales tax and public safety perceptions.
The Minnetonka City Council on Feb. 12 reviewed a proposed 2026 community survey and discussed which questions to keep, cut and test ahead of a spring fielding. The city and consultant Peter Leatherman said the questionnaire currently totals about 164 items and staff are aiming to reduce it toward roughly 115 questions to improve response quality.
The discussion focused on method and utility: Leatherman recommended first measuring baseline opinion and then adding factual frames to test whether specific information (for example, how much of a sales‑tax would be paid by nonresidents) changes support. "You can't make the assumption that everybody will hear that what was it? Uh 54% would come from residents outside the community," Leatherman said, explaining why the sequence of questions matters.
Council members and staff debated which topic areas to drop and which to retain. Staff proposed removing topics that recur annually and do not drive actionable policy—such as leaf‑blower noise, organized garbage collection and chemicals on lawns—while keeping issues anticipated on the city's near‑term agenda. Several council members urged keeping questions on e‑bikes because the topic intersects with state legislative work, and some supported keeping teen‑programming questions for equity and service planning.
The group also wrestled with tax questions. Staff said past surveys show strong baseline support for property‑tax increases to "maintain" services but little discrimination on whether higher levies should be used for maintenance versus enhancements, producing small analytic cells for follow‑ups. Leatherman recommended dropping low‑signal follow‑ups and instead testing the individual projects that would appear with any local funding measure.
Public safety and immigration impacts drew sustained attention. Council members asked whether the survey should include questions about residents' sense of safety since recent enforcement operations. Staff recommended an open‑ended question about the most serious issue facing the community and suggested a short set of items to measure whether recent events have changed household behavior or opinions of safety.
Staff will return with a revised question set in spring and aim to field the survey in April.
