The Readfield Select Board recently devised a Budget Development Input Survey 2015 and posted it on our town website.

Unfortunately, the survey consists of leading questions and so many misleading presumptions that any results will be useless and, most disturbingly of all, a gross misrepresentation of the public’s input.

The survey is anonymous, which, while seemingly reasonable, is unlike our town meetings recently taken away from residents where real input occurred democratically. It is even unlike the new secret ballot process of budget approval where a voter checklist at least ensures residency and one person, one vote.

This poorly designed survey easily allows anyone living anywhere to take it more than once. Adding to the invalidity of the survey, a member of the Select Board actually self-identifies within the responses and attempts to “moderate” the input as if it were something other than a survey.

Readfield’s Select Board will get only unreliable information from this survey. One would hope, they will abandon any pretense of considering any input from it as valid or of any value.

We should applaud public officials who seek to listen to residents’ input. But if they govern in a way and devise surveys that are designed to steer input to only that which they want to hear, we will need to speak up louder next election at the ballot box.

Bruce Bourgoine

Readfield

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