Council Weighs Polling Attitudes of Residents : Thousand Oaks: The $16,000 survey would probe opinions about municipal government, services and policies.

Does Thousand Oaks need an Olympic-sized swimming pool or an animal shelter? More freeway landscaping or more affordable housing? And which would you be willing to spend tax dollars--your tax dollars--to support?

Thousand Oaks City Council members want to know.

They’re also curious about your income. Whether you’re married. Where you work. And whether you’d rather see rock ‘n’ roll, acrobats or business conventions in the Civic Arts Plaza auditorium.

To gather all that information, council members tonight will consider spending $16,000 to survey constituents. If approved, detailed questionnaires would be sent to randomly selected households next month, probing residents’ attitudes toward the city’s government, services and policies.

Council members are likely to get an earful.

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Response to previous attitude surveys, which are conducted every five years, has been strong. Although the forms can take half an hour to fill out, 37% of those who received the 1989 questionnaire completed and returned it.

And politicians generally study the results.

“When you get a 35% response rate, you can’t slough it off,” Councilwoman Judy Lazar said. “Some of the questions ask for really practical, hands-on information that we can use in the next four years.”

Of course, some answers are predictable.

Year after year, going back to the first survey in 1968, more than 75% of residents have ranked preservation of ridgelines, clean air, public open space and a semirural atmosphere as “very important.” And year after year, residents have called for more low-cost housing and more recreational facilities.

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Because residents’ basic values have remained constant over the years, Councilman Alex Fiore complained that the attitude survey sometimes becomes little more than a political tool for slow-growth activists.

“Too often, the questions are so leading in nature,” Fiore said. “For example: Should we preserve more oak trees? Of course, 99% of the people will say yes. Then when we go to zone something (for more intense development), people stand up and wave the attitude survey at us.”

But while some answers may be predictable, the survey also tracks changes in residents’ attitudes toward their local government.

The 1989 survey, for example, charted a dramatic drop in citizen satisfaction. Only 48% of respondents proclaimed themselves “very satisfied” with life in the Conejo Valley, down from 58% in the previous poll.

And the Thousand Oaks government earned high marks from only 27% of respondents--down 5 percentage points from the previous year.

Finally, the number of people “very satisfied” with the city’s policies on ridgeline development, hillside grading and oak tree preservation dropped significantly.

Anne and Dan Birdwell understand those complaints. And this summer, they’ll register their own, not by filling out a citizen attitude survey but by moving to Washington state after nearly 30 years in the Conejo Valley.

“It seems Thousand Oaks is becoming like the (San Fernando) Valley, though people want it to be a small-town atmosphere,” Dan Birdwell said. “It’s got to be the city’s fault--they’re the ones who are making the decisions.”

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But even as the Birdwells move out, 79-year-old Howard Kettering will be celebrating the second anniversary of his move to Thousand Oaks, which he considers an ideal retirement spot.

“I think it’s a great town,” Kettering said. “The city communicates with me by the way it’s run: You look around and you see enough parks, enough schools, everything conveniently located. It’s a well-planned town.”