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Calculating Your Opinion And The City Budget

P. Kenneth Burns / WYPR

For the fifth year, some Baltimore City residents responded to questions such as:

How would you rate the cleanliness of the city?

What issues would you say are problematic for the city of Baltimore?

Overall, how satisfied would you say you are with the quality of services that Baltimore City provides?

It’s part of the Baltimore Citizens Survey conducted by the University of Baltimore’s Schaefer Center For Public Policy on behalf of the city.  The survey, while measuring the productivity of city services, is also part of the budgeting process.

Andrew Kleine, chief of the city’s Bureau of the Budget and Management Research, says the survey began in 2009 when they began using a process called “outcome budgeting,” which first identifies a result and then uses that outcome to build a budget.  “An important component of that is finding out what citizens are thinking,” said Kleine.  Kleine said that they look at how services contribute to the Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s six priority outcomes

For residents who took the survey, their top three priorities are education, reducing crime and economic development.  “We also found out, as a follow up to that question, that less than half of our citizens are interested in paying more taxes for anything,” adds Kleine.

The city awarded a five-year contract to the Schaefer Center in 2008; paying $60,000 a year.  The contract, which is up for rebid in the fall, has an MBE component that was awarded to Maryland Marketing Source.

The center uses a computer assisted telephone interviewing system where the questions and answers are stored.  “The citizens survey for Baltimore City is a fairly typical public opinion survey as far as the center’s concerned,” says Bill Wells, the center’s survey lab manager.  The telephone interviews are done over landlines due to issues surrounding the use of cell phones for opinion surveys.

“There’s federal law that governs how we dial cell phones,” said Steve Raabe, president of Opinion Works, “We cannot dial them through an auto dialer; we have to hand dial each number.”  Raabe praised the work that the center is doing in terms of the survey.  “They are making a tremendous effort to reach out to all parts of the city.”