RANCHO SANTA FE — At its Jan. 20 meeting, the Association gave the Long Range Planning Committee permission to send out its survey, asking the membership their opinions on a variety of subjects, but not before tweaking some of the wording.
Some of the questions on the survey ask if a particular procedure is “fair.”
Director Jack Queen objected to the wording, saying he looked up the word in a dictionary and it said it had to do with honesty and impartiality, which is not appropriate for the survey. He said if a person had an issue with one of the community agencies, he was sure it had nothing to do with dishonesty.
After some discussion, it was decided the word should be changed to “reasonable.”
Queen and Director Dick Doughty agreed with the word change.
“I think we are either fair or unfair,” Doughty said.
Director Anne Feighner agreed. “What is fair to one person is not fair to another,” she said.
Queen congratulated the committee for its months of hard work. “It was outstanding. Very well done,” he said.
“It was a lot of hours,” said Rochelle Putnam, who was appointed chairman of the committee by the Association.
Last summer, the Association approved the formation of an ad-hoc Long Range Planning Committee, to take the pulse of the community to determine how Rancho Santa Fe should look 10 or more years from now.
Its first task would be to prepare and distribute a new community survey.
“We got a great committee,” Putnam said.
She said it was made up of two former board members and other long-time members and volunteers within the community.
“We looked at long-range planning 20 years ago and 10 years ago,” Putnam said. “I think we have come up with questions that are simple and meaningful. For instance, we didn’t ask if should be conserving water because everyone would say “yes.”
In both 1990 and again in 2000, the Association surveyed members and prepared long-range plans based in partly on the responses to the survey questions.
The 2010 Long Range Planning Committee hired a market research firm to determine survey topics and helped draft the questions. Over the next five months, the committee met on several occasions and worked diligently to refine the questions.
The Association believes the surveys are necessary because over the years, priorities have changed as have the demographics. Ten years ago, the idea of preserving open space was very popular. The new survey will help determine if the community would like the Association to stay the course in buying such property as the Osuna Ranch.
In recent years, the membership is more adamant about securing high speed Internet for the area.
After the survey is returned, work will begin on a long-range plan.
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