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Village of Lansing Trustees continued to consider data Monday from a telephone survey of residents, with help from Survey Research Institute (SRI) Director Yasamin Miller.  The Town of Lansing had hired SRI to conduct its survey, then decided to allow the Village to come into the project, splitting the cost of the survey.  While many questions were identical for respondents from both municipalities, some were not.  And because the demographic of the Village is different from that of the Town, Miller recommended putting more weight on the interpretation of renter responses.

"You have a higher rental population than the Town but the renters are only 27% of your respondents," she noted.  "I would look at that data much more closely than the other breakdown, because your renters are very different.  They don't line up with the general population's responses.  That's why I suggest you weight your data to the renter population if that's important to you.  If you think the Village is based on owners and residents who are hear for the long term you wouldn't weight it.  But if you think renters have valid input, your data is under-representing your renters.  It's not an invalid approach.  It's done routinely."

Miller, a Village of Lansing resident, frequently attends meetings as an interested citizen.  She has been a strong proponent of asking residents how they view the Village and pro-actively updating the Village comprehensive plan on a regular basis.  Monday she came to address concerns by some board members that the sample was too small to provide statistically valid results.

She said that sample size does not necessarily mean data is not valid or not representative of the population.  She explained that this study was done on a probability basis so that everybody in the Town or in the Village had an equal probability of being selected into the study.

"In the 1948 election between Dewey and Truman they took a poll of a million people," Miller explained.  "That poll overwhelmingly said that Dewey was going to win.  The newspapers reported it.  As we know now Truman won by a landslide, and the reason was that those million people were not representative of the population.  Although you only have 308 observations, less than the original sample size, they are randomly generated.  And your refusal rate was really low.  Only 27 people out of 673 from the Village and the Town that refused to speak."

Miller explained her company purchased a randomly generated set of telephone numbers from marketing systems.  Telephone numbers are assigned by census blocks.  The area codes and prefixes are known, and the suffixes (the last four numbers) are randomly generated.  They go through a lot of bad numbers to get good numbers.

"We also have the cell phone problem," she explained.  "It used to be a problem for us, but now we know based on cell towers which cell phone numbers are in a certain geography, because they ping them.  They work with cell phone providers to get these lists, so we know with high probability which cell phone numbers are in a certainb geography.  So although you have a 518 area code you could be predominantly using your cell phone in this area."

Trustee Julie Baker asked Miller to help the Trustees interpret the data, especially in light of differences in priorities between renters and homeowners.

Miller told the board that renters don't respond to surveys at the same rate as homeowners, and young people don't respond to surveys at the same rate as older people.  because of the smaller sample of renters the survey lost about .3% accuracy by not getting a higher response rate, going from about 5% to 5.3%, which Miller said wasn't much of a tradeoff.

But she did note that renters who responded have a different point or view than homeowners, especially in their perception of how communicative their government is.  The survey showed that homeowners were eight times more likely to say that the Village government communicates well than renters.

"The renters aren't hearing from you," Miller said.  Responding to residents concerns is almost 50-50 good and poor."

Other issues where homeowners and renters did not align included support for heavy industry as well as retail stores.  Renters were twice as likely to strongly encourage moderately priced housing.  They were more than twice as likely to say they strongly support retail stores.

"Town center, there's no difference between renters and homeowners," Miller said.  "Where you see differences in support for town centers are in your age groups.  Surprisingly your youngest age group opposes supporting a town center.  On development, renters are 50% more likely to say you should encourage heavy industry.   Heavy industry is much more highly encouraged by young people.  They're looking for jobs.  But they're also the ones most likely to leave, so this is not going to be a retirement community."

She said there is across the board support for sidewalks and bike paths, and people rated emergency services generally well.  Transportation for elderly has strong support, but those who own are twice as likely to support it than those who rent.  More than 70% said renewable energy is important for growth.  Just about everybody agreed they don't want hydro-fracking in the Village. 

There was a 50-50 split on whether tax dollars should be used to support the arts.  There was more support for using tax dollars for hiking and biking trails.  The majority supported protecting historical sites.  There was a lot of support for new housing developments, and more that 85% support protecting agricultural lands.

"We don't have many historical sites to protect anyway," Baker said.

Because of the high volume of retail and other businesses in the Village, Trustees are developing a second survey they plan to distribute to business managers and owners.  Baker said she will provide a first draft for other Trustees to consider.

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