After a few weeks of debate, education, and compromise, on Aug. 13 the Board of Selectmen (BOS) approved executing a contract with Great Blue Research to conduct a poll of preferred uses for the former Academy School. Because the concept of a statistically significant telephone poll had unsettled residents and some Ad-Hoc Academy Guidance Committee members, the final contract will likely have language allowing more people to participate in the process than initially anticipated.

The selected polling firm, Great Blue Research, made its initial pitch to the BOS and town in late July. The poll would be a telephone poll and 400 residents would be called to get a statistically significant result with a margin of error of less than five percent. However, due to the concern that calling a limited number of people might make some residents feel left out, residents and committee members started asking about ways to expand the number of people who could participate.

At the BOS meeting on Aug. 13, resident and Academy Committee member Kathryn Hunter said she would like to see the board approve the contract and include the opportunity for a handwritten questionnaire that any resident can fill out in addition to the phone poll.

“I am not asking that this in any way expands the questions or the period of time for polling, just that it provides another avenue or another means for the public to deliver their thoughts and opinions on this,” she said. “Great Blue has said they can do this. I believe it would be an additional cost, but I am hoping that additional cost would be very reasonable if the town in fact makes the copies of the questions, collects them here, and delivers them to Great Blue. It would mean that Great Blue just has to essentially tally the hard questionnaires and include them in the summary.”

Over a series of committee meetings, representatives from Great Blue made it clear that a handwritten form could be made possible since its proposal already includes an online survey in addition to the telephone poll. The results of those two methods would be analyzed both separately and together.

Hunter said there is no opposition on the committee to using Great Blue. Selectman Al Goldberg said he got the same feeling after speaking with Academy Committee Chair Henry Griggs.

“Chairman Griggs did also iterate the same language that Kathryn [Hunter] did in that the committee believes that the public needs some additional form of input into this process besides just the polling by phone,” he said. “They would like us when we are contracting with Great Blue to build that additional form of input into what we are hiring them to do.”

Selectmen agreed to the idea, but pointed out that it will cost more money. Since the exact figure was unknown, the BOS bumped the payment for the contract up from $10,000 to not to exceed $16,000.

“Lets get this document executed,” said Selectman Bruce Wilson. “Then we can get Great Blue in to explain to the board and to the committee how something on paper would work…I think we provide for it here and then we answer the question in due course.”

The board approved the contract and expenditure unanimously. The expenditure request now has to go before the Board of Finance for final approval because the money is coming out of the planning reserve fund and the authorization of both boards is needed to access that account.

Great Blue

The BOS invited the firm Great Blue Research to present to the board and the public as a potential polling firm on July 23. Great Blue Research, based in Cromwell, is a market research company that has decades of experience working with various municipalities across the state and greater northeast as well as industries such as utilities and healthcare.

For $10,000, Great Blue would conduct a comprehensive phone survey, calling residents with a set of committee-approved questions to get a representative sample of responses from the population. Residents quickly jumped in with questions about the no-call list, non-local cell phone numbers, and why a phone survey is the best way forward considering the dwindling number of landlines or home phones among residents.

Representatives from Great Blue said because the company isn’t selling anything, it can call numbers on the no-call list. Additionally, the list of phone numbers called is generated by billing address, not area code, so cell phones and numbers with non-local area codes are included, and a phone survey tends to be more accurate because it calls numbers at random rather than an opt-in online survey, which tends to show more extremes in opinions.

While representatives from Great Blue answered a number of questions for the public, the actual number of people who would be called for the survey—400—was a sticking point. The company would receive 10,000 numbers and would call until it got a proportional total of 400 responses, giving the survey a margin of error of just under five percent. The company would use an in-house call center to collect the data and would then report the data back to the town.