Can Never Have Too Much Data

On Tuesday, we saw the presentation by the Citrus County Chamber of Commerce to the BOCC about the sales tax town halls and survey they conducted. The idea for this was to gauge citizen's interest in potentially voting for a one percent sales tax increase for Citrus County.

You can view the report here

The Chamber did an excellent job getting feedback from the citizens. Over 160 people attended the workshops and over 500 people submitted a response to the survey. In a county of 115k registered voters, assuming everyone who provided feedback was a registered voter, we have a large enough sample size to have an accurate survey. (95% confidence level with 5% margin of error).

But as I mentioned previously (here), the market research person in me says we need more data. Full disclosure, I have a marketing degree, so a lot of my study in college was market research. I would not label myself as a market research expert by any means, but I know enough to know we need more data.

The Chamber opened up the survey for another week or so to allow more input into that. You can visit their site to get some good information about the sales tax and perhaps answer some questions you may have. Also, the survey is there to fill out if you wish.

Now the question... Why the need for more data?

The Chamber survey provides great information. The commissioners are able to see the things the community feels they will support for a sales tax as well as a duration and concerns they have about it. All good things to have and to know.

But.... where do commissioners go from there?

Let us take duration for example. The Chamber survey says 10 year duration is the most supported length of time. But that was chosen by only 111 people. That is 21.81% of the total people surveyed. Is the BOCC supposed to ignore the other 79.19% of the people that responded and just choose 10 years because it had the most votes? Will those other 398 people support 10 years? If not, it fails.

That is why we need more data. We can use the data that the Chamber collected and build a new survey that asks those specific questions. Will you support 5 years? What about 10? 15? 20? Where do people lose support for it?

I would think that would be a good thing for the BOCC to know, right?

Same goes for usage. I am going to assume since road resurfacing was the overwhelming item of support that the BOCC would include that in any sales tax proposal. But what about other things? Parks and Conservation combined were supported by the same number of people as road resurfacing. Does that get included? What about fire/ems or stormwater, the other leading uses.

How does the BOCC decide what to include and what not to include?

Maybe a question like "Would you support a sales tax for road resurfacing AND conservation/park land purchases?"

We can find out exactly what people will and will not support and various combinations of things. Will they support one item only? Two? Three?

It is pointless for the BOCC to throw darts at the board and just pick what they think people want based on a survey that didn't ask them if they would support that combination of uses. It is destined to fail.

So we need more data. How do we get it?

Another survey.

I put together the survey I will share with you below. I based this on the information from the Chamber survey to try to get more information for the commissioners to consider in two weeks when they chat about it. Again, thank you to the Chamber for their work to get to this point. I hope this helps provide more detailed data on the information they collected. The idea is not to toss out what they did. It is the opposite. It is using the results of their survey to further refine the data.

I am of the opinion that we need to slow this down a bit and do it right. The hard deadline is May 2026. We don't need to decide this in November 2025. We do not need to wait until May either, but certainly January/February/March gives the community more time to digest this and provide their opinions.

Others I have spoken to feel that if we slow momentum now by getting more data, we will cause this to fail. They feel it needs to be talked about in two weeks and voted on at that time. Determine the usage, duration, etc that night and direct staff to craft the language.

Not sure that is the best route as it is basically rushing the process only to then let it sit for months before voting. I would think we lose momentum that way.

From the Chamber survey we learned citizens are concerned about transparency and the government. Wouldn't slowing this down a bit and gather more data help with transparency? Basing the decision on data provided to them is transparent. Rushing the decision for an arbitrary deadline in November doesn't do that.

But what do I know?

In any case, below is the link to the survey. I will share it on the facebook page as well. My goal is to get as many people as possible to participate in this survey. Please share it with friends and family. Every person's feedback is important and helps provide the BOCC with more information. I will be sharing this with the BOCC and Chamber prior to the meeting in two weeks.

Click here to visit the survey.