The City of Lincoln is having some cash problems, so they want your input via an online survey to help determine if cuts should be made to particular city services, if taxes should be raised, or some combination of the two.
We don't yet know just how bad the budget picture is. That's no doubt an intentional move by the Mayor's office. One could put a positive or a negative spin on that decision. Positive: Mayor Beutler doesn't want Lincolnites to be distracted by numbers and instead wants us to focus on "big picture" questions. Negative: The survey isn't about Lincolnites helping to solve the budget problem, but about helping Mayor Beutler sell his already-made decisions by providing him with information that will help him tailor his messages.
The survey is long, requiring approximately 20 to 30 minutes of your time. More if you actually bother to read all of the background information that is provided. For example, here is the overall background document (PDF). There are a handful of others. Note that the questions are randomly selected from a pool so your survey will be unique.
Interestingly, at least one aspect of the survey doesn't appear to be particularly friendly to persons with certain disabilities or types of web browsers. Early in the survey is a sorting task that requires the presence of Javascript and the use of a mouse; keyboard input doesn't work, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of fallback for users who cannot enter data in the expected way. Visually-impaired users, among others, are apparently out of luck. That's a relatively small population, sure, but I can think of several physically impaired and politically active individuals in Lincoln who will have a fit.
That glitch aside, I encourage you to take the survey. If nothing else, participating in the survey and reading the background material will provide you with lots of good information about how our local government is reaching out (or appearing to reach out, if you prefer) to Lincolnites.
Comments
See what your friends and neighbors have to say about this.
Let me just weigh in here and make it clear that I believe this effort is genuine. If you recall from last year’s budget process, input that was derived from that public engagement initiative was used by the Mayor’s office to make policy changes. For example, there were pretty significant changes made to StarTran as a result of the public input generated.
Although certain budgetary items may already be “decided” - there are plenty that are not, and getting public input may be influential. At the very least, as this is a public effort, results from this process will be made public and therefore residents of Lincoln will be able to hold the Mayor’s office accountable to the public’s choices. Thus, I also encourage people to take the survey and stay involved. Its a heck of a lot better way to be engaged than to just write in hate letters to the LJS.
I’m commenting on all of your hate laters to the LJS in ALL CAPS and with lots of exclamations points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111
Share your thoughts with the community.
Commenting is no longer permitted on this post.