The Snohomish City Council recently approved paying Ron Dotzauer, CEO of Strategies 360, $13,000 to conduct “focus group” sessions asking for opinions of city government.
Strategies 360 cherry-picked eight participants, paying them $150 each for their in-person opinions. Guess what? The majority of those eight weren’t even city residents. So Dotzauer, with city manager Larry Bauman’s agreement “supplemented” the in-person bogus focus group with telephone interviews of eight actual city residents. According to Dotzauer, all the participants were selected through “word of mouth, social media, referrals, etcetera.”
The bottom line is that our city government spent $13,000 for eight telephone calls to a cherry-picked sample of city residents. Even at that, Dotzauer’s report didn’t tell the city taxpayers anything that they didn’t know. Namely, that Snohomish city government doesn’t spend money responsibly and that the real purpose of Dotzauer’s survey was to justify the status-quo with more propaganda (more window dressing for more tax hikes and more foolish spending).
No wonder there is so much cynicism about local and national government. This boondoggle is right up there with John Koster suing Snohomish County taxpayers for a million dollars because his temporary employment contract wasn’t renewed. Apparently, Koster and his advisers believe there is more gold in suing the citizens than filing for elective office and asking the citizens for their votes
Morgan Davis
Snohomish
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