Push for Poll on Sports Arena Follows Trend

If the Los Angeles City Council decides this week to poll residents before voting on a downtown sports arena, it will practice a decidedly 1990s brand of participatory democracy.

State and local policymakers across the nation have begun turning to polling experts during the last couple of years to test the public waters before plunging into expensive new projects.

Within the last year or so, the Los Angeles Community College District commissioned a poll to find out how the public would feel about a parcel tax; Diamond Bar and Commerce brought in pollsters while designing business district development programs; and Santa Rosa in Northern California used a survey to reshape its municipal bus service, said League of California Cities spokeswoman Debbie Thornton.

Los Angeles Councilmen Joel Wachs and Nate Holden want their colleagues to commission a poll of voters before committing $200 million or more in public funds over the next 25 years to provide land for a privately owned and operated sports arena and entertainment complex for the Kings and Lakers at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The two oppose the arena project as now structured, because taxpayers would get no direct share of the profits.

“While the ultimate decision properly lies with the council, this is also a participatory democracy,” Wachs said in asking the council to spend up to $30,000 on a poll before going ahead with the arena project. “That means that the public has a right to be heard, especially when it’s their money that’s being spent.”

Wachs’ motion, scheduled for a council vote Tuesday, touches on the fundamental tension that underlies the debate over polling as a decision-shaping tool for elected officials. Does a poll make for responsible, responsive leadership? Or is it a tool for flight from leadership?

State and local policymakers across the nation have surveyed the public, on a limited basis at least, throughout much of the last quarter of a century or so since polling became prominent, gauging views on everything from crime to traffic congestion. The difference during the last couple of years, pollsters say, is that the polls are used increasingly before key votes to set specific policies.

“Politicians can’t know everybody today,” said Charles Rund, who did polling for the Reagan-Bush presidential ticket in 1984. He founded his San Francisco-based Charlton Research Co. in 1983. “The alderman in Chicago who knew the neighborhood and everybody in it has faded away; only in the very small towns can you find your mayor at the Kiwanis Club meeting.”

U.S. citizens have always felt a little ambivalent about how much they want their representatives to decide and how much power they want to give directly to the people, said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York and a polling consultant to ABC News since 1980.

“Clearly, democratic theory says, ‘Consult your constituents,’ but at the same time, we in the American system don’t quite trust the people,” he said. “That’s why we have representatives and systems of checks and balances in our governments.”

At worst, Muzzio said, polling becomes a way out for elected leaders unwilling to make a controversial call on their own, a form of government by focus group. “If you can’t take the heat, take a poll” is how Muzzio sums up that approach.

At best, polling provides a reliable, legitimate sounding board for constituencies that are growing in size, diversity and distance from government.

Rund, whose government clients have included the San Francisco Public Library, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the California Department of Parks and Recreation, sees public opinion surveys as today’s communications tool.

“It gives an opportunity for the whole diverse citizenry to express their views to the policymakers in an objective, statistically sound way,” Rund said.

It’s that “objective, statistically sound” part that some polling critics take issue with, noting that how questions are framed can markedly influence the outcome. One group of researchers, for example, found that merely inserting the word “welfare” into a question yielded very different responses than the phrase “aid to the poor.”

“The greatest threat posed by polls is that they equip political leaders to manipulate public opinion into supporting their desired policies,” political scientists Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Robert Shapiro of Columbia University wrote in a 1994 opinion piece in The Times.

But Jacobs and Shapiro nonetheless defended polling as a legitimate way to “determine whether government actions respond to the public’s wishes between elections” and cautioned against the “false assumption that responsiveness to public opinion and leadership of it are mutually exclusive.”

Cost concerns can dampen officials’ appetite for polls--or tempt them to cut corners.

In Southern California, with its large, diverse population, a good public opinion survey commonly costs from $25,000 to $50,000, said John Fairbank, whose Santa Monica-based firm, Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin and Associates, has tested citizens’ views for dozens of municipalities, including polls on sports complexes in Sacramento and Detroit.

Fairbank’s firm also sampled voter attitudes about the Los Angeles Unified School District in preparation for a school facilities bond measure on the November ballot.

“Public officials want to really get a sense of what voters want,” Fairbank said. “It’s part of the theme of trying to listen to voters in conjunction with taking clear leadership stands on policies.”

The technique is hardly foolproof, as the Los Angeles Community College District recently found out. A year ago, its board members commissioned Fairbank’s firm to survey voters by telephone about how they would react to paying an annual parcel tax to upgrade campus recreational facilities. The survey results were favorable, a district spokesman said, but, when board members moved to impose the tax earlier this year, they encountered such an uproar that they decided to let voters have the final say. That measure also is on the November ballot.

“The problem is that people’s reactions change as circumstances change,” particularly in the course of a campaign, said Darrell West of Brown University.

Surveys work best for general guidelines rather than specific permissions, West said.

“Polls can give you the general contour of how the public feels; they can exclude certain options and encourage other possibilities,” said West, who is chairman of Brown’s political science department and director of the university’s public opinion polling laboratory.

He cited a proposal to sink millions of taxpayer dollars into a new shopping mall for downtown Providence, R.I. Based on polling by the university on the hometown project, West said, the financing plan was restructured to require less upfront money and several safeguards for the public’s investment.

Wachs said that is what he is hoping for with the Los Angeles proposal--a better deal for taxpayers and a chance for them to be heard before the council makes a legally binding decision on whether to proceed with the arena project. That decision, expected Oct. 15, could commit the city to issue $60.5 million in revenue bonds to obtain and clear land for the arena, to be repaid with interest over 25 years.

Backers say the complex would spur economic revitalization in the city’s long-stagnant downtown and help put the under-booked and money-losing Convention Center into the black at last.

Wachs recently opened a telephone hotline, drawing more than 500 responses to his call for objections to the project, admittedly “not a scientific sampling.”

A professionally commissioned poll, Wachs argued, would provide a better measure of public opinion.

Noting that the arena proposal was quietly negotiated for about a year before it was publicly unveiled a few weeks ago, Wachs knows he has an uphill fight on his hands in seeking the poll.

But his longtime chief deputy, Greg Nelson, digging in city archives recently, found a high-profile precedent.

Nelson unearthed the results of 1974 and 1977 polls commissioned by the council and then-Mayor Tom Bradley when the city was considering making bids for the 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics Games. The polls showed overwhelming public support for hosting an Olympics--but only if it could be done without added costs to taxpayers.

The city missed out in 1980, but in 1984 went on to host a widely heralded Summer Games, the first ever to be staged at no cost to taxpayers.