SOUNDING OFF:

The people of Newport Beach no doubt have knitted eyebrows over a newsletter mailed to them last week by Mayor Ed Selich.

This letter reports the summary findings of a Newport Beach Residents Survey conducted in December among a cross-section of 600 residents by the ETC Institute of Kansas. This must be a subject of high interest to the community, but in three colorful pages the newsletter manages to say essentially nothing.

Beyond reciting residents’ responses, it offers no interpretation or valid indication of what’s good, what isn’t, and what needs to be done. You can go on the city of Newport Beach website ( www.city.newport-beach.ca.us) and click on “Citizen [sic] Survey” to view full information in a slideshow along with matching surveys among business and developer respondents, all in brightly colored charts.

What’s wrong with that? The problem is that numbers and charts alone are inert and meaningless without context. If someone tells you the home team scored 20 in last night’s game you’ll wait for the rest of the sentence, because whether 20 is good news or bad news depends of course on what the opposition scored — the benchmark. Similarly, measures of people’s satisfaction with anything — a car, a restaurant, a city — have meaning only when compared with something else that’s relevant, such as the competition or an achievable goal.

Opinions are subjective and volatile, even when scientifically recorded. Shakespeare said , “Comparisons are odious,” but in opinion surveys they are indispensable. Major corporations and survey professionals know this.

Luckily, there is a benchmark, and an excellent one. In a newsletter dated April 2, City Manager Homer Bludau announced advance findings of the survey and included data provided by ECT from surveys among a sampling of other California cities. Here, then, is the key, and it offers some pleasant surprises that one would not have suspected from the neutrally worded city newsletters:

 Newporters are a happy bunch. The table/chart shows why;

 Newport Beach outscores the average of other Californian cities in residents’ satisfaction with almost everything, and often by a wide margin, with no significant shortfalls. Overall quality of life in the city is rated distinctly higher;

 The strongest comparative advantages of Newport Beach are in the city’s management — its efforts to prevent crime, quality of services provided and customer service from city employees;

 Residents feel safer than in other California cities when walking in their neighborhood after dark or by day, and in city parks;

 Other clear advantages of Newport Beach are the availability of walking and biking trails, the speed of police response to emergencies, the quality of programs for seniors and of recreation programs for youth, the management of traffic flow; quality of parks and recreation programs, and maintenance of parks.

Areas where Newport Beach does not outshine other California cities are in the enforcement of traffic laws, number of parks and availability of outdoor athletic facilities.

The city’s weakest areas, though not necessarily any weaker than in other cities, are in planning for growth, enforcement of codes and ordinances, and frequency of police neighborhood patrols.

The city’s management and council deserve a compliment on this report card, though their handling of this important survey is less praiseworthy. The residents are surely keen to know how their city stacks up, and as taxpayers who funded this survey they are entitled to full value, especially when they are its principal subject.

The consequences of misreading such an important survey go beyond loss of interesting information. There are the risks of mis-allocating resources in pursuit of the wrong remedies, and of rewarding and penalizing the wrong people or departments. Indeed, inconclusive findings open the door to the very subjective processes surveys are supposed to replace. That is already happening. There is, for example, no substantiation for the mayor’s conclusion in his newsletter that managing traffic flow, maintaining city streets and infrastructure, and maintaining the city’s beaches and bays are top priorities.

No one would dispute the importance of these activities, and one hardly needs a survey to agree on them; but low ratings alone are not evidence the city could do much better or that they are any more important than frequency of police neighborhood patrols, enforcement of city codes and ordinances, and careful planning for growth — the criteria on which Newport clearly performs no better than other California cities.

TOM MOULSON lives in Newport Beach.