The village published the results of it’s Garbage Service Survey today. Key results after the break…
Although the council, in particular Commissioner Durkin, has spoken in favor of a straight cart-based system, residents overwhelmingly are against the village switching them to a cart system.
When asked if they would recycle more if given a larger recycling cart, almost 28% said yes, over 54% said no. The balance were neutral on the question.
Amnesty Day was a big winner, endorsed by over 80% of respondents.
Almost 4 out of 5 residents take a pass on renting a cart and use their own cans.
A common sentiment here at DGreport.com, residents felt nothing broken, nothing in need of changing or fixing.
The big caveat is 55% of responders had 2 or fewer household members, while 45% had 3 or more. 1,175 residents responded to the survey.
The full document is available here: Garbage Service Survey
There are also almost 800 comments fully documented. As noted by John Schofield in his comment in the previous Trash Talk post:
“the voice of the people who responded is pretty clear: keep the pay-for-what-you-trash sticker system. It would be difficult for the Village Council to vote against this message.”
So let me get this straight. We are asking our village officials to make a decision based on the 1,162 respondents. That is roughly a 2% sample of the population in Downers Grove. Who knows how many answered it twice on different computers with different IP addresses. That is not the will of the people gang. That is basically DGreports readership base. This Council needs to stop asking for input and make a decision. You are the elected officials not us. If we don’t like your decision we will vote for someone new. Newsflash…that is called a Democracy. I know many of you out there have a warped sense of what Democracy really is from watching the Obama administration. Just make the call council and be done with it. The people will move on to the next issue. There will always be a Thoman, Wrobel, Schofield, Falesch or Walz who will have some gripe about something. That is not the point of a democracy. The point is you win some and you lose some. We complainers and bloggers just have to deal with it sometimes.
1,175 respondents = 2.4% of the population (48,724). That’s a pretty good sample size. If you’re want in-depth analysis ask a statistician, but:
95% certainty is what researchers typically use as a baseline. What this all means is when 80% of the respondents say they don’t want carts, there’s a 95% probability that the entire village, if polled, would range from 77.2% to 82.8% saying they don’t want carts.
That error % is way down in the weeds. The village wanted to know what people thought, and the survey is reliably giving them accurate information.
Wouldn’t it be more realistic to count households rather than residents? I doubt many six year olds completed the survey, and the number of multiple responses per household is probably pretty small to none. I’m guessing it’s closer to 10% of the HOUSEHOLDS responding.
It would be pretty easy to see if voluntary responders to this poll who may prefer stickers over cart collection have biased the poll. First, cross check with ARC to see how many residences already subscribe to carts and how it compares to the 21.2% listed above. Also, compare the 55% of responders who have 2 persons or less in the household to what the Village already knows about local demographics.
There were paper surveys available at the library so not everyone used thier computer.
Mark you’re doubling the sample error. It should read “would range from 78.6% to 81.4%”. John Schofield is correct; use households, which further narrows the sample error. This isn’t a random survey, but results this robust fairly shout to be heard.
Mark is right regarding the sample size *if* the survey is an accurate representation of village demographics. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The portion of respondents 61+ (35%) seems awfully high, as well as the residents who are in household of 1 or 2 people (55%) as mentioned in the post. Responses could be weighted to better reflect the village demographics, but a heavily-weighted survey isn’t great, either.
In addition, a voluntary survey like this is going to be biased toward residents most interested in going out of their way to let the village know how they feel.
A research company would be able to help the village council field a more reliable, representative survey. I’m guessing that’s not how we’re looking to use our tax dollars, so working with what we’ve got, village council should keep in mind the “voice of the people” in this survey is, really, a voice biased toward certain segments of the population.
Mark,
Agree with Schofield, Households should be used as the sample set due to this being a household service. Makes the sampling even more meaningful.
Only 60% of the respondents find the quality of service good. In my business, if I received those results, I would be HISTORY… Is this the first garbage survey this village has performed? Can we compare the data to anything?
Make sure you guys put up another comment when you get all those answers…
When will Council give us the carts that most people that I talk to want? Get rid of amnesty day and all the garbage pickers already.
wow, i missed something…a “larger recycling cart”? How about “A recycling cart”? Larger would be nice too; those small rectangular blue ones we have to buy at the store now don’t hold much and stuff tends to get scattered on the ground.
The way the question is worded implies that the village currently provides some type of recycling containers for us; i know there used to be some small green ones, but i don’t think I’ve seen a new one of those in the past 12 years
Just today I saw a car hit a recycle bin on main street just passed fire house 3. The wind blew it right into the car. That would never happen with a toter.