District hires firm for phone poll on Muldown
Hoping to take the publics pulse on a bond issue request for Muldown improvements, the Whitefish School Board on Jan. 10 voted to hire research firm Anderson Robbins for a public opinion survey.
“As we go through the Muldown project and process for developing a bond request, it’s important for us to know what the public is thinking out there,” Superintendent Heather Davis Schmidt said. “I think it will be extremely informative to the Muldown project.”
Trustee Marguerite Kaminski voted against the contract.
Anderson Robbins is a Boston-based firm that specializes in research for political and corporate clients.
Davis Schmidt told trustees the district had considered two similar firms from Denver and Los Angeles, each of which quoted prices around $17,000 to $20,000 for the research. However, Chris Anderson of Anderson Robbins spent years skiing in Whitefish in the mid-1990s and offered a lower price of $7,000, roughly a 50 percent discount from their normal price structure.
“He has a lot of fondness for Whitefish and wanted to support the community with this project and he and his business partners have agreed to support this project for only their hard costs, meaning they’ll provide us all their consultation services for free,” Davis Schmidt said.
After several months of evaluating options for improving the aging Muldown Elementary School, the Muldown task force identified three options which range from a bare necessities repair to the construction of a new school. The costs for these improvements ranges from $13 to $21 million, and securing funds for the project will require putting a bond issue before Whitefish voters.
The school district and Anderson Robbins will spend a few weeks evaluating the district’s needs and goals for the survey so an effective questionnaire can be crafted. The resulting telephone survey will likely take a week to complete. After the survey is completed, the firm will present its analysis to the school district within two weeks.
“The main goal of this is to give you all a gauge on the likelihood of a bond measure passing in Whitefish,” Anderson said in a call from his home in Massachusetts during the Jan. 10 meeting. “It’s really important to remember that the goal of this is to give the most accurate estimation of what an election day vote would look like on this issue. We’re not looking to unfavorably bias the results one way or the other, we’re looking to get as close to reality as we can.”
Davis Schmidt said she’s had success with this kind of public opinion research at Missoula County public schools.
“It was very successful in terms of communication planning and really understanding what the community was feeling,” she noted.
Kaminski asked about Anderson Robbins’ history of working with schools on bond issue voting research. Anderson said while they have not done this exact situation in the past, they do have experience working with municipal agencies and researching bond request opinions for energy and utility companies.