As Mayor Todd Gloria has prepared his budget proposal for the next year, the city says its leadership has factored in a range of considerations for what to prioritize — including the results of a recent survey that led San Diego residents to give their own input.
The survey, which launched in February and closed Friday, asked San Diegans to weigh in on which city services they care most about and which ones they would feel comfortable reducing, especially as the city faces a $146 million deficit for the coming fiscal year.
It was the first time the city conducted a budget survey. But the survey, built by the city’s Performance & Analytics Department, faced some limitations.
There was no set limit to how many times a person could take it, although residents were asked to respond just once. It was technically possible for people outside the city to respond, though they weren’t supposed to. And the city only offered it in two languages, English and Spanish.
Some community members questioned how the results could accurately represent city residents and their different needs.
“Survey data can sometimes be taken as the word, but it’s not necessarily always reflective of what the full community is saying,” said Erin Hogeboom, director of San Diego for Every Child, when the budget’s first draft was released last month.
The budget the mayor proposed last month included cuts to several services, including $11 million from arts and culture and reductions to funding for parks, libraries and youth services. He is set to release his revised budget next Wednesday.
The city closed the survey on Friday. It will share a final report of the responses with the mayor early next week before the revised budget is released, said city spokesperson Nicole Darling.
By the time it closed, the survey received more than 13,000 responses from across the city, and just over 12,000 respondents included their council district. The largest share of responses, at about 2,600, came from District 3 — which covers the neighborhoods around Balboa Park and downtown. It was followed by Districts 2, 7 and 1.
The fewest responses came in District 8, which includes Barrio Logan, Grant Hill, Shelltown, San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, at 572.
Respondents were asked about which city services they most want to protect. They could also identify city services — from parks and open space to homeless programs to graffiti removal — that they would feel comfortable reducing, on a scale of very unacceptable to very acceptable.
The latest results through Wednesday show respondents are most concerned about poor street and sidewalk conditions, homelessness and housing costs. They want to protect street repairs and resurfacing, police and fire-rescue services from funding cuts, according to the city’s survey data.
Responses show that the biggest share of survey takers — 40% — prefer to see a mix of some service cuts and some new revenue to address the city’s financial crisis. Slightly fewer, 37%, said they preferred eliminating some city programs to preserve others.
Over 70% said they wanted to see new revenue come from hotel or tourism taxes. Just 15% said they want new revenue to come from additional parking fees.
The priorities recorded in the survey, centered around the city’s core services, haven’t changed in the months that the survey has remained open, Darling said.
But Bob Lehman, executive director of San Diego Art Matters, says he feels that the survey guided takers toward certain responses and didn’t provide enough context about the impacts of cuts.
The bulk of the questions listed groups of city services that survey takers could rate on whether or not they thought cutting funding for that service would be acceptable.
“It kind of shapes what your response is, when core services are listed alongside arts and culture,” Lehman said. “Without any context, people are nudged towards protecting the obvious essentials.”
The city says the groups of categories were random and that there was no limit to how many times the survey taker could select one of the ratings on the scale for those questions.
Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, said it’s a good sign that the city has asked for feedback from the public, especially when big financial decisions must be made. But he stresses that analyzing the survey should go beyond the top-line results.
“You have to be careful that it’s going to be representative and … that you’re looking at different age groups, different income groups and different parts of the city, to make sure that you’re not missing any important details about how city services need to be delivered in times when the budget is in stress,” he said.
The city’s survey included optional demographic questions, including a respondent’s age, income level and race and gender. But Darling says the survey wasn’t meant to be a “statistically representative sample, but rather a snapshot of resident perspectives.”
Most of the survey questions were optional. The only required response was a respondent’s ZIP code, though the survey could be submitted with a ZIP code outside of the city limits. In late April, the city said that fewer than 1% of responses were invalid or from outside the city’s ZIP codes.
On its webpage, the city asked respondents to take the survey only once — but there was no way to prevent them from submitting a response multiple times, which the city acknowledges was a limitation.
The city says the survey is just one of several factors informing the mayor’s budget decisions — with others including legal obligations, economic conditions, departmental needs and the city’s responsibility to maintain services like public safety, infrastructure and homelessness response.
“The survey is one tool to understand how residents are thinking about tradeoffs in a difficult budget year,” spokesperson Joya Patel said. “It does not drive decisions on its own.”
