We achieved something of a milestone today: completing business and residential surveys that we hope Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz will use to survey both communities. The business survey was vetted with Suzanne Beck, executive director of the Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce and its Economic Development Committee. The city’s Chief Information Officer, Antonio Pagan, was included in the email containing the surveys.
The surveys were based on two well-regarded surveys we found for the City of Loveland, Colorado. We were fortunate to draw into our project the help of a retired Survey Professional in Florence, Carl Townsend, who helped ensure the surveys were useful and accurate.
You can see our letter to the mayor and the completed business survey and residential survey. The mayor expressed a willingness to publish the survey to the city’s website, but it’s possible he will require changes to the surveys prior to publishing. One concern about publishing to the city’s website is how representative the feedback will be of the city as a whole. There may be something of a selection bias either pro or anti initiative from those responding on the website compared with the community as a whole.
We hope that the surveys will be promptly posted. We also included information in our letter about feasibility studies.
For the moment the ball is with the mayor on this matter. The mayor of course juggles lots of issues, but we are hopeful that he will move forward on it reasonably soon.