Sunday, April 8, 2007

A1:"Parks & Rec survey: Wants outweigh willingness to pay"

People want more stuff, and they don't want to raise their own taxes to do it. I think if you look at any other survey like this, you'd see more or less the same result, it's no surprise at all. But by emphasizing this perfectly normal "disconnect," the Courier inserts a point of view. Did you write it that way, Cindy, or did your editor do a little rearranging?

We're almost 400 words into this before we read anything about what the respondents consider most important, which was the primary purpose of the survey. (I was in the "randomly selected" group of people who got the survey, and I responded.) If I read this right, open space came in fifth among about 30 priorities advanced by Parks & Rec. That strikes me as more significant than its placement in the story.

There's another way to interpret the don't-raise-my-taxes result (I wasn't in that group, by the way). Could it be that Prescott residents think they're paying more in taxes than the value they're getting back?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

or maybe they just draw appropriate conclusions from incidents in the past where they did vote to raise their taxes and still don't have squat for open space to show for it.

leftturnclyde said...

MJ raises an important point .I for one sure as hell dont mind paying extra to get, well something extraordinary, but what usualy happens is the money is raised and seperated into piles and distributed and speeches are made..nothing changes or so it seems ..question when did parks and rec ask 4 more money ,what for ? was it a successfull thing ?