When Aaron Weiss requested internal emails from Mesa County related to a public opinion poll on a proposed national monument for the Dolores River region, he wasn’t expecting them to reveal that monument opponents were involved in suggesting poll questions.
But that and other revelations produced by the emails request have him contending the poll the county conducted didn’t objectively measure residents’ views about the monument proposal.
Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities conservation and advocacy group, said the emails confirm that everything from the poll methodology to the construction of the questions wasn’t actually intended to measure public opinion.
“The whole exercise was designed to get the specific result that commissioners and monument opponents wanted,” he said.
SUPPORT FOR POLL
Aimee Tooker, a Nucla resident and opponent of the monument proposal who participated in suggesting questions for the poll, disagrees.
“I think the Mesa County commissioners did an excellent job of really capturing both sides of the issue and not skewing the results either way. They definitely did their due diligence with each side of the issue,” she said.
The poll was conducted by Broomfield-based Magellan Strategies, which does polling work for local governments and school districts. The county contracted for it to be conducted for a cost not to exceed $22,500.
People were invited to participate in it via a text message sent out on April 24 in Mesa, Montrose and San Miguel counties. The Protect the Dolores Coalition’s draft monument proposal covers nearly 400,000 acres mostly in Mesa and Montrose counties, but also in San Miguel County.
Among the poll’s findings, about 6 in 10 respondents in the three counties opposed creating a national monument. After the poll’s release, Mesa commissioners came out against the monument proposal.
The emails released to Weiss make no indication that pro-monument people were consulted on possible survey questions before it was conducted. Scott Braden with the Colorado Wildlands Project, who has been a leading voice in favor of designating the monument, said the first he learned about the poll was when his wife received it on her phone.
Comparing that to anti-monument people being consulted on poll questions, he said, “I think it’s disappointing to not have gotten that outreach from the county and it could be perceived as kind of some bias or putting their thumb on the scale I suppose by only going to the opposition for their ideas about questions.”
He declined to comment on what he thought of the poll itself, saying that since he isn’t a pollster, that would just be him opining on the issue.
“I will say as a taxpayer, though, it’s concerning when the county’s using taxpayer money to basically again just talk to one side of an issue before the county has developed a position on the issue,” he said.
SUGGESTED QUESTIONS
Emails show Tooker and fellow monument opponent Kendra Ballard, also a resident of Montrose’s West End, being involved in coming up with questions that were sent to Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel. They were then considered by county commissioners and staff for inclusion and possible revision as the county worked with Magellan on a final list of questions.
Weiss said it’s a little hard to tell what ended up in the poll questions as a result of Tooker and Ballard’s suggestions because of the editing that happened over the course of meetings and phone calls.
“Clearly some of what Aimee wanted made it in there,” he said, adding that he thinks she maybe wanted more loaded questions beyond that, which the county pared back a bit.
“To me it’s most notable that they let her just write the first draft and that was their starting point for crafting the poll questions,” he said.
Mesa Commissioner Cody Davis told the Sentinel that although the county communicated with Tooker on the poll, “I’ve communicated more with Scott Braden than any single person or group” on the monument issue. And he said the county actually modeled the first several questions in the poll after pro-monument polling “to get an accurate barometer.”
Weiss voiced concern about Commissioner Janet Rowland saying in one email, “I don’t feel like there is enough education in the survey, to see if people’s opinions change after they learn the facts about the unintended consequences of a national monument.”
He said that to suggest in a poll that creating a monument would have unintended consequences, rather than just saying this is what monument proponents and opponents say and asking which of their arguments respondents agree with more, is veering into push-pull territory and “shows where the commissioners’ heads were at.”
The survey didn’t mention unintended consequences. It did ask respondents a second time if they supported creating a monument, after providing some information such as a map of the proposed monument and what it would mean for things like uranium mining and water rights. After respondents were informed of these things, 60% opposed the monument idea, versus 57% earlier in the survey.
COUNTY INVOLVEMENT LEFT OUT
Weiss questioned Mesa County not being mentioned in the survey as being the one behind it. Davis had requested in one of his emails that no mention be made in the survey of the county’s role in it.
Davis told the Sentinel, “That’s how you do polls. If you listed a name, people would be automatically biased.”
Meanwhile, Weiss argues the text message asking people to take the poll shouldn’t have indicated it was specifically about the monument proposal. He said that automatically skews the results because people with no opinions on the issue are less likely to fill it out than those who do.
He also is concerned because the poll link ended up being passed around on social media, with at least one monument opponent encouraging people to complete the poll. Magellan pollster Courtney Sievers addressed this when presenting the poll results to commissioners.
She said about 78,000 text messages were sent out at about 12:45 p.m. on the day the poll was conducted, and around 5 p.m. the survey link got passed around. She said that sometimes happens with topics that are a bit more in the public eye.
“But we have ways to kind of quality control this,” she said.
She said Magellan has access to data indicating when someone opens a survey. She said Magellan also has ways of looking through data, including regarding surveys completed after the link was passed around, and making sure it is only considering surveys completed as a result of its text messages rather than through the survey link being shared.
The poll results are based on 1,272 survey responses Magellan considers to be valid, and have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.74%, at a 95% confidence interval, Magellan says.