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« Legislative News TAC Collecting Data on Unit Roads
By Tim Brown
TAC Legislative Staff
At TAC, particularly in the County Information Project (CIP), we send a number of surveys to county officials. While they can be time-consuming for you, they provide us with information we just can’t get anywhere else. Since so many of you have helped us in the past, and continue to help us, by responding to our surveys, I thought it might be of interest to you to discuss one of our surveys in more depth.
To keep this article reasonably interesting, I’ve selected a survey the CIP is currently working on that involves a question that seems to come up every year. Although the frequency can vary, on average it seems like we get several calls asking about “unit roads” every month. While we have some data on which counties have a unit road system, that information has gotten a bit old since it was last updated in 2003.1
On July 13, 2009 the CIP sent out a survey to find out which counties currently utilize the County Road Department System (aka “Unit Road System”) to manage their county roads. The survey request was sent out to 240 counties.
FYI, the survey didn’t go to all 254 counties since it turns out that either we were missing e-mail addresses for 14 county judges or they had previously requested not to be contacted by our online survey service. In addition, five of the addresses we had on hand turned out to be invalid for one reason or another. Since then we’ve made some corrections to our contact list and made more attempts to contact those county judges we missed the first time.
We contacted the county judges instead of the commissioners for several reasons. Mostly, we didn’t want to send out 1,016 e-mail messages (254 x 4 = 1,016)! Doing so would have resulted in a lot of duplication as multiple officials replied from the same county. There probably wouldn’t have been four responses per county given that we don’t have e-mail addresses for many commissioners, but even two or three per county would have been wasteful. We considered sending the survey to just one commissioner per county, but didn’t want to cause any heartburn by choosing one commissioner over the others in each county.
For this survey, we’re using an automated online service, www.SurveyMonkey.com, to run this survey and collect the responses.2 For the unit road survey, we’re only accepting one response per county. That’s another reason we picked on the county judges instead of the commissioners. By accepting only one response per county, we don’t have to de-conflict multiple responses from different officials in the same county. The judge can pass the survey on to one or more other people to fill out, but we receive only one response. (If the survey request is passed to more than one person, each of those individuals can access the application where they can both enter responses and edit each others’ responses.)
The survey itself is very short. The first page asks for your name, e-mail address and phone number plus requires you to select the county. This is not always necessary, but it can prevent some potential headaches. Since the URL in each e-mailed survey request is unique, we can correlate the responses with the requests. Unfortunately, we can’t tell who actually responded to the survey. That’s why we ask for the contact information; if any questions come up later about the responses, then we can contact whoever completed the survey for that county.
In addition, for some surveys we send hard copies of the final report to the office of whoever actually completed the survey. We’re not planning to print hard copies of the report for the unit road survey. However, with the contact data we can send soft copies via e-mail to those who completed the survey.
The second page simply asks what type of road management system is in use in the county. There are actually four different types available to choose from although technically some counties are restricted by statute and have fewer options.3
Depending on your answer to that question, you will next go to one of two pages. If you told us your county uses the Unit Road System, we ask you to tell us what year that system was adopted by the county. Otherwise you go to a page where we ask if your county ever had the Unit Road System and, if so, when your county stopped using that system. While we are interested in the answers and would like to have the information, we understand that answering these particular questions can be difficult. Therefore, answers are not required in order to proceed to the next page.
Finally, everyone goes to the last page of the survey. There we provide room for any comments you wish to make. And that’s it; you’re done with the survey!
As this article is being written, we are in the first phase of collecting responses. On July 22 we sent out a second request, again using the survey service’s e-mail system. This request only went to those counties that had not completed the survey. Depending on how many counties respond to the second request, we may or may not send out a third request.
Eventually, however, we’ll have to start making phone calls. Unlike some of our other surveys where a sample of county responses is sufficient, in this case we plan to ask for the information over and over until most of the counties have responded. Ideally, we’d like to get at least a 95% response rate, but will probably be happy with only 90 percent.
That means that we don’t really know when the survey will be closed. At some point we’ll decide that (a) we have enough responses and (b) getting more responses is more trouble than it’s worth.
If you are interested and would like to see how the survey is progressing, go to www.county.org/resources/countydata/products.asp#roads and click on the “Unit Road System Survey Summary” link. This Web page has a summary of the responses we’ve received. It is tied directly to the actual survey service so the information will be up to date. While the page will show you what selections have been made, you won’t be able to see the text answers that have been provided. This will prevent anyone from seeing the e-mail addresses that have been provided, but will also keep the final comments hidden.
Please contact me at (512) 478-8753 or TimB@county.org if you have any questions or comments about this article, our surveys or the online survey service that we use.
1 See http://www.county.org/resources/countydata/products.asp#roads for both the original report and the update.
2 If you are thinking about running your own survey, there is a small learning curve when you first use this service, www.surveymonkey.com, but the price is very reasonable.
3Chapter 252, Transportation Code.
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