By BONNIE J. GORDON
Los Alamos Daily Post
bjgordon@ladailypost.com
Anna Dillane has served on the seven-member Los Alamos Community Development Advisory Board (CDAB) for two years. She resigned last week due to a disagreement over a recent community survey.
The survey was intended to gauge community opinion prior to rewriting the ordinances that deal with weeds, outdoor storage and property maintenance. The survey seeking input on the County’s Chapter 18 Nuisance Code closed Dec. 27.
“The survey is completely biased,” Dillane said. “I’m petitioning the County Council to throw this survey out. It’s high time the Council started listening to the community.”
Anyone can present a petition to Council with five signatures. Dillane has collected many more and invites community members to visit her store, Boomerang, to sign it if they wish.
The major problem with the survey is that the questions are skewed toward implementing “a HOA (home owners association) type of standards,” Dillane said.
“I’m so passionate about this,” Dillane said. “It’s being shoved down our throats.”
Other problems with the survey include the use of identifiable Los Alamos homes in the examples and confusing questions, she said. Dillane also questioned the collection of responders email addresses when they took the survey.
Former County Councilor Antonio Maggiore agreed with many of Dillane’s points.
“It’s garbage … the Council is looking to get specific answers with the survey,” he said. “It would be wrong to act on this flawed survey. The community deserves better. If they care, Council will do the right thing and throw the survey out.”
There is a misunderstanding on the part of some people about who created the survey, Community Development Director Paul Andrus said. The survey was not created by Decker Parish Sabatini, the consulting firm overseeing the entire code revision project. It was created by a professional survey firm called Polco, which is entirely separate from Decker Parish Sabatini and was hired by the County to conduct the survey, he said.
“It was not crafted to be slanted,” Andrus said. “The intent was to get questions out to the general public to get a sense of the community’s feelings about property maintenance standards. The survey focused on residential properties because most of the conversation has been about that. Commercial real estate will also be included in code enforcement.”
Andrus stressed that the survey results were only one data point in the deliberations over the code rewrite. He maintains that CDAB was involved in developing the survey.
“We want to thank the members of CDAB for their assistance in reviewing and providing early input on the survey at the Aug. 16 meeting and then through several follow-up coordination phone calls,” Andrus said.
Andrus admits that using photos of Los Alamos homes as examples in the survey was a mistake. All of those photos have been removed from any materials and generic photos inserted, he said.
According to Andrus, the survey was done with two groups. The first 5,400 received postcards asking them to take the survey online. This generated 1,209 responses online. The second group came from community members who did not receive the cards, but learned of the survey through outreach to the community by Los Alamos County. It generated 233 responses.
Officials with Polco, the firm that created and distributed the survey clarified that the survey is anonymous,” County Public Information Officer Julie Williams-Hill said. While emails and zip codes were collected it was only mandatory for those survey respondents who were not part of the randomly selected sample. These entries were used by Polco to verify whether the survey taker lived in or outside of the community and whether there were duplicate entries.
County Council Chair Randall Ryti is taking another look at the survey, he said.
“The point of the survey was to give input to the Council,” Ryti said. “It’s only one part of the process of changing the code. We’ll be listening to what the community has to say about it before making decisions.”
