Corps Challenges Gorton Criticism Of Survey Senator Calls Project Phony And Absurd; Agency Says His Numbers Aren’t Correct

Sen. Slade Gorton is denouncing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for allegedly paying Washington residents as much as $144,000 to answer questions on a survey he considers phony.

“The odds of winning in this sweepstakes are better than anything Ed McMahon can guarantee,” Gorton said during a Senate speech in which he called the project absurd.

The Washington Republican has been skewering the corps for months, on everything from the Kennewick Man to dam drawdowns. But his most recent complaint against the dam-building agency doesn’t seem to hold much water.

A corps spokesman said the agency doesn’t know where Gorton gets his figures.

It is in the middle of a $300,000 survey of some 10,000 Northwest residents - not 12,000 as Gorton claimed - as it gathers opinions on possible changes in the Snake River dams.

Most of that money is spent on preparing, mailing and analyzing information Congress told the agency to get, spokesman Dutch Meier said.

Those 10,000 respondents will get $2, not the $12 Gorton suggested, as an inducement to answer an eight-page questionnaire.

Gorton apparently assumed that the methods the corps’ pollsters were using to test a preliminary version of the survey would be used throughout the project.

Gorton and his staff were in a retreat Friday and could not be reached for comment.

The corps is trying to find out what the public thinks of proposals to breach four dams on the Snake River as a way to improve conditions for endangered salmon. Breaching - removing portions of the dams to let more water flow downstream - would force changes in the current operations of the dam and reservoir system. Among those feeling the biggest impact could be boaters, anglers and other recreational users.

Normandeau Associates, a national polling firm hired by the corps, will survey randomly selected residents of the Pacific Northwest later this spring. Before its subcontractor sent out all those surveys, it mailed a sample questionnaire to 150 people.

The sample questionnaire came with a $2 bill. People who filled out the survey, mailed it back and agreed to participate in a 45-minute follow-up telephone interview, received another $10.

Bill Spencer, Ag Enterprises Inc., a Fort Collins, Colo., firm overseeing the survey, said people who receive a small reward are more likely to take the time to answer the questionnaire.

“I call it the guilt factor,” Spencer said.

Only about 60 people participated in the follow-up phone interviews, which the company used to improve unclear or ambiguous questions.

The corps has separate surveys to gauge the public response to six different scenarios for changes to the dam system, Spencer said. They also want to see if the responses differ between five Northwest states.

The company will include a $2 bill in the final surveys, hoping to boost the rate of return to about 50 percent. That should produce about 800 surveys for each option, a number that gives solid statistical data for the corps to send to Congress, Spencer said.

But no one will be offered $10 for follow-up phone interviews, he said.

John Loomis, who designed the survey, denies that there’s anything phony about it. He is a professor of research methods and environmental economics at Colorado State University and the author of numerous articles on surveys.

“I have no interest in doing advocacy research,” Loomis said. “As I told people in the focus groups, I buy my salmon at Safeway.”

Loomis held focus groups in Seattle, Spokane and other cities around the Northwest to discuss the issues and refine questions for the survey. That’s part of the cost of the project.

Polling experts say there’s nothing wrong with including a small cash payment to people who receive the questionnaire.

“In mail surveys, it is fairly common,” said Diane Colasanto, past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research. It doesn’t bias results, she added.

The number of people the corps will survey is large, but because it is testing the response to so many different options, the numbers sound reasonable, she said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo