Ephrata recycling survey reviewed

EPHRATA - Initial results of Ephrata's recycling survey show people support the activity.

The survey indicated residents found other city activities more important.

City Administrator Wes Crago showed the city council the results from an online survey the city is doing about recycling.

The survey is still open and people can participate at www.surveymonkey.com/s/7N9RRKZ or at Ephrata City Hall, located at 121 Alder Street SW.

"It's important on any survey or any poll to talk about context," he said. "This is not a randomized survey."

Crago explained about 15 percent of people support an issue because they are predisposed, and about 15 percent of people oppose the same issue because they are predisposed.

"About 70 percent are undecided. They're waiting for more information. They don't care. They haven't been informed. They don't know about it," he said. "When you do a poll, like a Gallup poll, hopefully, they've done their job by totally randomizing the respondents, so you get an accurate cross-section of those three groups."

Since the city used a free online survey, it allowed the respondents to select themselves, Crago said, adding the people responding to the survey care about the issue one way or the other.

"When we talk about 226 people have filled out a survey, you need to be very careful at looking at anything other than those 226 people," he said. "The example would be that 93.8 (percent) support recycling. Does that mean 5,700 people in town support recycling or 212 support recycling? I would urge you to say that 212 people support recycling, not extrapolate that to a larger audience."

Crago said the survey is one piece of information for the councilmembers to use and isn't intended to be the only piece of information.

"It's been pretty consistent, and as long as people are still using it, we'll keep the survey live," he said.

About three-quarters of the participants stated they recycle, and 93.8 percent support recycling, Crago said, adding 65 percent of the people are willing to pay at least $10 a month more for their recycling.

"But a quarter of the (participants,) or little more than a quarter, are against raising rates at all," he said. "So you've got a little split there in terms of what people are willing to support and how many of them."

The survey also asked people to rank the importance of recycling compared to other possible city projects. Recycling ranked in the middle of 12, behind safety and maintenance projects, Crago said.

"It's a little bit hard to do because we're talking about large-scale, million-dollar, complex projects that are being summarized in a single sentence," he said. "People are responding to a single sentence."

Crago said it isn't how Recreation Director Ray Towry or he would like to compose the questions, but the restraints of the free service forced them to.

"It wasn't as easy as I would like it to be," he said. "All of the (options) had a fair amount of support, none of them had more than three-quarters support, so none of these were wildly popular and none of them were wildly unpopular."

Towry and Crago determined the responses seemed to indicate safety was the most important to people, followed by maintaining the services already available.

"From the staff's perspective, I'm not sure what the council wanted to get from this survey, (the staff) wanted to see if there was any support at all for a recycling program. There is," he said. "How it compared to other projects that have been discussed, and it compares well, but perhaps not as high as increasing funding for public safety or this water pressure zone in the north and southeast heights."

Crago suggested if the council wanted to continue, they should add it to the next agenda to discuss it.

"We've already discussed some ideas, that we will present to you at that time, of where to take the project of recycling and creating a more specific plan for people to respond to other than a generic idea of recycling," he said.