Riverside County this month launched its community budget priorities survey for the second year, hoping to get even more input about residents’ needs.
“We really encourage people to tell us what their needs are, tell us where they want their money to be spent to provide services to them,” County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “At the end of the day, we are providing services to the community, so it’s important for the community to have a significant impact on how that money is spent.”
Once again, the county will partner with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to analyze the results and provide a report to the county that Van Wagenen said would help inform the recommended budget presented to the supervisors in June.
“Your input is critical, because we need to make sure we’re going down the right path in where we’re dedicating the monies,” newly elected Board Chair Karen Spiegel said at the January 13 Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting. “It’s [our] continued commitment to a responsible, balanced and transparent budget.”
Changes to this year’s survey include how the county collects geographic data to better understand whether the people responding reside in unincorporated communities or cities.
“We really are trying to reach all aspects of the community, not just geographically, but across all the different spectrums,” Van Wagenen said. “We are pushing it out to just about every potential group we can think of, that’s really anyone that lives or works in Riverside County or receives services.”
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There’s also a place for people responding to the survey who don’t live in the county to explain their connection to the area, for example if they work, own a local business or visit the county regularly.
Responses to the survey are anonymous, and Van Wagenen said the county reads the responses to the survey, including the open-ended narrative responses where people can elaborate on their answers.
The county first launched the initiative as part of last year’s budget process. The inaugural effort garnered more than 24,000 responses.
“When we did it last year, it really was sort of an experiment,” Van Wagenen said. “We had never engaged in something quite like this before, and the board of supervisors was very pleasantly surprised with the amount of feedback and response and the quality of that engagement.”
In addition, the county held a number of in-person community meetings where Van Wagenen said another several hundred people came out and a virtual town hall that had more than a thousand people listening.
“One of the things that was not so much surprising, but rather gratifying, is that, by and large, the results about what the priorities are from the community really mirrored what the county’s priorities had been,” Van Wagenen said. “When we asked the community where they wanted to see their dollars spent, generally speaking, it was exactly how the county was already spending those dollars.”
The online survey is available in both English and Spanish and will run until February 28. There will be a series of five community budget workshops held throughout the county in April with budget hearings set for June 8 and 9.
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