As the Clinton Town Council prepares to make its recommendation on a proposed budged the members will have a new tool: the results of budget surveys conducted earlier this winter.

In order to better gauge what town services citizens value most, the town partnered with a Morgan School math class taught by John Madura to conduct a survey to assess how people feel about certain services provided by the town.

The survey, which ran from Dec. 11 to mid-January, asked respondents a variety of questions related to how people felt about the importance and quality of the different departments in town. Respondents were also asked questions that monitored how they felt about various strategies regarding adjusting the tax rate to pay for services and how that would affect their families.

At press time, the Town Council is preparing for three budget workshops at which each department budget will be reviewed line by line. After that, the council hold a special meeting on Tuesday, March 2 to set a proposed budget. It’s likely the budget survey results will help inform the decisions that are made on March 2.

Town Manager Karl Kilduff explained how the council could use the surveys when it was launched.

“The point of the survey is a tool for further community engagement around the budget. It is an opportunity to get feedback before public hearings and a referendum vote. It is not meant to be a replacement for those steps; it is a chance to get early insights,” Kilduff said. “The council would be able to see public perception of services and the priority given to them. That would help inform budget decisions.”

The Survey

In the time it was open, slightly more than 150 residents responded to the survey, a sign Madura said was positive for a first-time collaboration between the class and town.

“The most important thing I want people to know is that we appreciate the time participants spent taking the survey. We also realize that the best way to thank folks is by making the results useful for the budget process. We are dedicated to doing that. We also want people to know that this experience is providing students with a very powerful, authentic learning experience,” Madura said.

At press time, the budget workshops had not yet begun and Madura said Kilduff had yet to share the full survey results with the Town Council. In light of that, Madura declined to share full results until the council had been provided the results for review. In his Feb. 9 budget presentation to the Town Council, Kilduff previewed a sample of some of the results.

A Learning—and Teaching—Tool

Even though the survey has closed and the budget process is underway, Madura said there is still a lot of work to be done by the students.

“Now that the original survey is complete, we will continue to analyze the data. There are many ways to look at it. We have looked at the overall results, but we’d like to unpack some of the results by subgroups we can identify in the data, subgroups like participants with children in the school system compared to those that do not and participants [who] have been here for several years compared with [those who] have more recently decided to call Clinton home,” Madura said.

When the survey launched in 2020, Madura explained to the Harbor News that part of the benefit of the survey for students was the ability to get the experience analyzing the results they had a hand in gathering. That experiences includes deriving statistical analysis from the gathered data, writing the results, using the best graphics to inform people of the results, and writing surveys. As such, Madura said the class will spend more time looking at the results and critiquing their process.

“We are going to explore other platforms for the survey and ways to make the survey even more accessible to citizens. I was really pleased with the survey questions themselves, but we will also need to examine those as well. Everything needs to be reviewed and evaluated. There is always room for improvement and there is so much to learn from the process,” Madura said.

One of the goals Madura had for the program was the ability to further collaborate with the town for more surveys in the future. The town has routinely conducted surveys to get information about a project under consideration. For example, in 2019 the town sought to survey the senior citizen population in town to learn what services that demographic was interested in and the economic development commission routinely seeks to gather data on the needs of businesses.

Madura said he hoped to eventually use the class as a research group that the various boards and committees in town could use whenever there was a need to do surveys and analyze data. After a successful first attempt, that partnership is one Madura said he sees continuing.

“We definitely see ourselves continuing to collaborate with the town. We had very high hopes for this first project and we feel that it exceeded our expectations. I think additional budget surveys make sense, as do other surveys, but we also see other areas for quantitative research support. We are actively moving on research with other parts of town government and issues that affect the lives of everyone in this town. We are excited to see all these possibilities for further collaboration!” Madura said.

The Budget

The budget process for Clinton is already well underway.

At a special meeting on Feb. 9, Kilduff presented the Town Council with an overview of his initial proposed budget. The budget calls for a total proposed budget of $59,012,976, a 4.86 percent or $2,733,388 increase from the current year’s budget.

The proposed education budget is $37,645,223, a $932,949 or 2.54 percent increase and the proposed town budget is $21,367,752, a $1,799,050 or 9.19 percent increase.

While spending increases under this proposed budget, the tax rate would decrease 1.31 percent due to growth in the town’s Grand List and an appropriation from the town’s fund balance to offset capital projects.

The Town Council can approve or make changes to this budget at its meeting on March 2. The proposed budget will then go to a public hearing in April and a referendum in May.

Zip06.com/the Harbor News will continue to monitor developments with the proposed budget.