With the Quality of Life survey getting down to its final days, members of council are concerned about the number of responses.
At the July 17 regular council meeting, director of planning Luke Sales said that as of the week before, the town had received around 400 responses to the Quality of Life survey. Sales said that was about a quarter of the total responses received for the previous Quality of Life survey.
As of July 26, Sales said the town had received 1,400 survey responses with 500 from the online survey and 900 from the print survey.
Sales said it’s hard to compare the numbers since he didn’t have any counts as to when the town received the surveys last time, “but certainly last time we did receive over 1,700 responses in total.”
Coun. Bill Luchtmeijer, who asked about the number of responses, said the town needed to make a valiant effort to get responses in the final days of the survey.
“We’ve now opened it up to a number of venues and a number of replies from same households that weren’t available in the past, yet we’re getting very poor turnout in comparison,” Luchtmeijer said. “I would think it’s important that we make a valiant effort in these last two weeks to make sure that we get as many responses as possible because the numbers just aren’t right.”
For this Quality of Life survey, the town mailed out the surveys to every houseold with the option to fill it out online or in print. People living outside of Qualicum Beach were also able to fill out the survey. Council also voted to include more spaces in the survey for people to respond why they voted a certain way.
Coun. Barry Avis said it might be worthwhile to change the timeline for the survey.
“I would hate to think that the last time we did a full OCP we had a 50 per cent return and this time we have 20 per cent. It would be a shame, especially when this is such an important document for the future of our town,” Avis said.
Mayor Teunis Westbroek said staff and council could look into extending the deadline when they get closer to the date.
To fill out the survey, visit www.qualicumbeach.com/survey.
