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Comprehensive Planning Committee tackles survey

(Feb. 4, 2016) Working on a long-term comprehensive plan for Ocean Pines continued this week, as the committee charged with creating the document met to go over a questionnaire that will be sent to all 8,452 homeowners in the community – and, potentially, some renters.  
The hope is that the questionnaire will give the committee enough data to pass something substantial onto OPA leadership, and that the ensuing plan will help inform future projects well into the next decade.
Heading up the questionnaire effort is Dr. Memo Diriker, from Salisbury University group BEACON, who largely led the discussion during a meeting at the administrative building on Monday.
Diriker said the draft questions, presented during the session, were created using three sources: recommendations from the committee itself, focus groups and phone surveys conducted by Diriker, and “best practices of other similar projects” conducted throughout the country.
The individual questions were grouped into several categories, such as service, amenities, costs and fees, financials/budget, governance and management, vision, and demographics. Within each category, the order of the questions will be scrambled to create several different versions of the final questionnaire.
Diriker said the specific categories, including the difference between “services” and “amenities,” would be defined in the questionnaire, and that recipients would be able to respond based on which ones they personally used.
“We saw services as critical to the operations of the organization – snow removal; fire service. Amenities we saw as the trails, the community center, golf, swimming,” he said. “I want to see what they think they are not getting here, and I [intentionally] used the word think, because some of it is perception and some of it is whether it is the OPA’s responsibility or somebody else’s responsibility.”
One question, “What amenities do you think Ocean Pines could do without,” was included because Diriker said some preliminary survey responders believed the association was overextending itself.
Other questions, like “How would you describe the level of spending from the Board,” were described as “probing questions” that Diriker said were meant to produce unstructured answers that could later be analyzed in depth by BEACON.
As an example, he said a board member serving five years might hear primarily from the same 200 or so “vocal” members in Ocean Pines, which he compared to an echo chamber. By quizzing more than 8,000 survey responders, Diriker said he hoped to establish whether those were majority opinions – or just the loudest ones.
“This is kind of a temperature taking thing that we do,” he said.
Questions on governance and management were “looking for perceptions,” and would include optional text boxes. Diriker said that if more than five percent of responders actually took the time to put something similar in that box, “it’s an issue.”
He added that there were pros and cons of asking demographic questions, the cons being that some would rather discard the survey than provide what could be construed as personal information. Diriker did note that, because BEACON received federal funding, all surveys they conduct must be anonymous.
Overall, he expected between 15-20 percent of surveys would be returned. Diriker he recommended that the survey be sent via email, with paper surveys available only by request. Computer kiosks at several locations, such as the Ocean Pines library, could also be an option, although Diriker said those would be “slightly devalued” to offset potential instances of fraud.  
Emailed surveys, he said, were easier to monitor for that kind of behavior, because each survey would have to come from a specific IP address. The board of directors, however, will make the final determination of format.
During the meeting, facilities Manager Jerry Aveeta wondered aloud about the purpose of the questionnaire.
“My struggle has been relating these questions to the tangible product,” he said.
Diriker said the comprehensive plan, ultimately the product of the questionnaire, would help direct priorities in Ocean Pines.
“Some things are quantifiable – other things are qualitative – the model helps us deal with both,” Diriker said. “The idea is to give you as much information as possible before you make your decisions with your long-term planning.”
The committee will meet again on Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 8 a.m. in the administrative building to finalize the questions. The board must then approve the questions, possibly during its Feb. 25 regular meeting.
Tentatively, the questionnaire will be released on April 18, with answers due back by May 31.
Diriker and BEACON could then conduct a phase two analysis of the results, although that would require board approval – and more money. The directors approved the initial phase of BEACON’s study, to include production of the questionnaire, in March at a cost of $8,250. To date, Diriker said he had been paid $4,950.