Survey Says
December 4, 2008
Isaiah Thompson, Philadelphia City Paper
YPP's editors figured the rest of the city agreed with them. Now they have proof.
When the time came to make hard decisions, the people of Philadelphia were not consulted. The cuts Mayor Nutter made in the wake of the financial crisis were hammered out almost entirely in private, and without — so far as we know — polling actual residents. And after consenting to meet with the mayor behind closed doors, few members of City Council have rocked the boat since municipal layoffs and library, firehouse, recreation center and other service cuts were announced in November.
But not everyone likes this. The past month has seen the rise of a slew of citizen groups organized to oppose the mayor's proposed cuts. Local blogs have taken up the battle cry, becoming forums for citywide discussion and hubs of information — because that's what people want right now: information, data.
It's easy to say the mayor's wrong, but without data, it's hard to show that you're right.
And that's where the blogs come in. While the mainstream media have covered opposition to the cuts, they've mostly played the traditional role of reporting on events: rallies, announcements, meetings. The city's blogs, on the other hand — even those operated by traditional media, like WHYY's "It's Our City" and philly.com's "It's Our Money" — are less bound by tradition. They've posted not just news, but documents, figures and data.
The blog Young Philly Politics is one of those places where reader-contributors not only look for news, but generate it. This week, co-editors Daniel Urevick-Ackelsberg and Ray Murphy took their project in citizen journalism a step further. In the wake of the mayor's announced budget cuts, both posted opinion pieces criticizing Nutter for failing to consider other alternatives to service cuts — like taxation (Murphy wrote a piece titled "Raise My Taxes Now!"; Urevick-Ackelsberg, "Keep My Taxes the Same!").
The bloggers opined that they would rather have their taxes raised slightly — or forgo proposed tax cuts — than lose services. They had some reason to believe that a majority of Philadelphians shared that opinion; a poll released in 2007 by thePennsylvania Economy League showed that only 10 percent of Philadelphians favored lower taxes if it meant service cuts. But those findings are dated, and not specific to the recent economic crisis and actual proposed cuts.
"The cuts came out with little explanation for what was being cut, and with what seemed to be little desire to ask Philadelphians what they thought about alternatives — the cuts are the cuts are the cuts," explains Urevick-Ackelsberg. "We guessed that people in Philadelphia wanted alternatives to be considered — so we decided to commission a poll."
Using ad revenue and private donations, they scraped together a not-insignificant amount of money — about $4,500 — and designed their own questionnaire. Over the course of three days, polling company Research 2000 called 650 registered voters in Philadelphia and asked each a series of questions — prepared by Urevick-Ackelsberg and Murphy, and vetted for neutrality by pollster and company president Del Ali — about whether Philadelphians would be willing to see taxes stay the same, or even rise, to keep services.
The results, released on Tuesday, seem to back up the editors' presumption: With a 4 percent margin of error, the poll found that more than 60 percent of all voters favored a proposal that would keep the wage tax at its present level to prevent service cuts; of various options for solving the city's financial crisis, a plurality (31 percent) favored using state money intended for tax cuts to keep services; and fully 66 percent thought Nutter should hold off on cuts in the hopes of obtaining federal money come January or February.
"If anything, I was surprised by how solid the opinion of Philadelphians was that we need to deal with taxes to solve this problem," remarks Murphy.
Nutter's office did not return a call, but asked about the poll at a town hall meeting Tuesday, the mayor said, "This is not about a poll. This is about running an enterprise." He suggested the poll questions may have been leading.
So what next? The poll was the first of its kind for the blog, and now its editors find themselves swimming in the unchartered waters of new media — they're part activists, part journalists and, now, part pollsters.
"We'd like to do more of this kind of thing in the future," says Urevick-Ackelsberg.
In the meantime, Urevick-Ackelsberg and Murphy are not so much planning to use the data themselves as hoping their data will reach City Council, as well as the hands of groups more dedicated to the activism side of things.
"We're mostly disseminating the information to people who are actually on the ground fighting these cuts," says Murphy. "If you're fighting library cuts, hey, you're right — people agree with you. And more importantly, here is the solution."