A few days after the firefighter union wrapped up their fear-based campaign to ask Edmonds voters to approve annexation to the regional fire authority, a second fear-based campaign began. It has a much friendlier catch phrase – Keep Edmonds Vibrant. But it’s good old-fashioned fear mongering none the less. Their leading website message is “Frances Anderson, our beloved parks, and other assets will be on the chopping block in perpetuity, unless we identify and pursue new and sustained revenue sources to run the kind of thriving city we want to live in.”  Should you be concerned about the work of the four individuals running this campaign – probably not. But you should know the context that this campaign is happening in, some basics about public opinion surveys, and the issues with the technology used to compile survey results.

Context: Two City-led efforts predated this effort by Keep Edmonds Vibrant (KEV). We spent a year defining the vision of the future Edmonds as part of the Comprehensive plan 2024 update. Secondly, Mayor Rosen did four key things.

1) Appoint a task force of financial professionals called the Blue Ribbon Commission to analyze why the fiscal emergency developed and define the path to financial stability.

2) Conduct a public opinion survey of a representative sample of the residents of Edmonds. The goal of this survey was to gauge Edmonds residents’ priorities and levels of satisfaction with city services. It was an important element in the new “budgeting by priorities” effort in Edmonds.  The report of that survey is on this city web page: 2024 community survey results report . It’s important to note this report is representative of the sentiment of the whole city.

3) Appoint an ad hoc Community Advisory Panel to priority rank the initiatives in the mayor’s proposed budget.

4) Conduct five focus group meetings with involved residents to elicit ideas on both revenue generation and expense reductions. These four efforts influenced the mayor’s proposed 2025/2026 budget. The City Council held public hearings, debated budget amendments and finalized the budget in December 2024.  For Edmonds, it was a more participatory process than past administrations used.

Survey Methods: The KEV survey is a self-selected survey (as opposed to a random survey, statistically valid sample survey, or other survey method) It will not produce results that are representative of the general population. Research shows that the results of a self-selected survey usually contain extremes – either people with a very positive opinion or people with a very negative opinion choose to take the survey.

Technology: KEV is using two pieces of Google-developed free software: “Polis” for the survey and AI-based “Jigsaw” to compile free-form text responses into meaningful categories, and associate idea threads together. Jigsaw software is designed for use in surveys with tens of thousands of responses where a manual categorizing effort is time consuming and error prone. It was published in beta in December 2024. (Beta software is a pre-release version of software provided to a select group of users for testing and feedback.) Two bugs relevant to this use in Edmonds have been reported so far: 1) the Other category has too many entries – categorization isn’t working as designed; 2) the category is sometimes a hallucination – meaning the AI software didn’t know the correct category and so just made something up. These significant shortfalls in the beta software will hopefully be overcome by the KEV administrators doing the categorization manually.

It’s appropriate to be curious about the validity of the software-generated report that KEV plans to send the City because it’s well known that AI software has bias from the data set that was used to train it. The creator of Polis reports that AI software that uses large language models may reflect and amplify social biases, and thereby misrepresent public opinion. (ref: article published in the online journal Medium on 12-18-24))

Summary: This new effort feels like four residents’ re-do of the City’s public engagement work in 2023 -2024. The KEV organizers wrapped up a successful 2024 campaign to get the Edmonds School District bond measure passed. Now they are working in Edmonds and running a new campaign. Their chosen software is cutting edge, but perhaps too cutting edge. Since the survey software has known issues, and since it can’t be representative of the whole City, I will sit this survey out. But I look forward to participating in the City-led public engagement on new revenue sources and expense cuts, the public hearings on the next property tax ballot measure and voting for Council positions in November. That’s the resident involvement needed to keep Edmonds vibrant.

Author Theresa Hollis lives in Edmonds.