Agenda - Council Work Session - 06/25/2024

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FoIc° Methods Selecting survey recipients All households within the City of Ramsey were eligible to participate in the survey. A list of all households within the zip codes serving Ramsey was purchased from Polco's mailing vendor, Go -Dog Direct, based on updated listings from the United States Postal Service. Since some of the zip codes that serve the City of Ramsey households may also serve addresses that lie outside of the community, the exact geographic location of each housing unit was compared to community boundaries using the most current municipal boundary file. Addresses located outside of the City of Ramsey boundaries were removed from the list of potential households to survey. Each address identified as being within city boundaries was further identified as being within one of nine precincts. From that list, addresses were randomly selected as survey recipients, with multi -family housing units (defined as those with a unit number) sampled at a rate of 5:3 compared to single family housing units. An individual within each household was randomly selected using the "birthday method". The birthday method selects a person within the household by asking the "person who most recently had a birthday" to complete the questionnaire. The underlying assumption in this method is that day of birth has no relationship to the way people respond to surveys. This instruction was contained in the introduction of the survey. Conducting the survey The 3,000 randomly selected households received mailings beginning on April 12, 2024 and data collection for the survey remained open for seven weeks. The first mailing was a postcard inviting the household to participate in the survey. The next mailing contained a cover letter with instructions, the survey questionnaire, and a postage -paid return envelope. All mailings included a web link to give residents the opportunity to respond to the survey online, as well as QR codes to further encourage participation. All follow-up mailings asked those who had not completed the survey to do so, and those who had already done so to refrain from completing the survey again. About 2% of the 3,000 mailed invitations or surveys were returned because the household address was vacant or the postal service was unable to deliver the survey as addressed. Of the remaining 2,944 households that received the invitations to participate, 471 completed the survey, providing an overall response rate of 16%. The response rate was calculated using AAPOR's response rate #2 for mailed surveys of unnamed persons.2 It is customary to describe the precision of estimates made from surveys by a "level of confidence" and accompanying "confidence interval" (or margin of error). A traditional level of confidence, and the one used here, is 95%. The 95% confidence interval can be any size and quantifies the sampling error or imprecision of the survey results because some residents' opinions are relied on to estimate all residents' opinions. The margin of error for the City of Ramsey survey is no greater than plus or minus five percentage points around any given percent reported for all respondents (471 completed surveys). In addition to the randomly selected "probability sample" of households, a link to an online open -participation survey was publicized by the City of Ramsey. The open -participation survey was identical to the random sample survey, with two small updates; it asked a question to confirm the respondent was a resident of Ramsey and also a question about where they heard about the survey. The open -participation survey was open to all city residents and became available on May 3, 2024. The survey remained open for three weeks. The data presented in the following tabs exclude the open participation survey data, but a tab at the end provides the complete frequency of responses to questions by the open -participation respondents. 3