The results of the Portland city auditor's annual satisfaction survey were published last week. The headline-grabber was the decline in the public's opinion of garbage pickup in the city, now that the Sam Rands and their ecological holy people have given everyone food slop buckets and reduced landfill pickup to every two weeks:

But there many other interesting angles to the survey results. For example, most of those responding were generally satisfied with the services they get from City Hall. But street maintenance is getting bad grades from 37%, outvoting the 33% who said it is good. That's the first time that bad has outvoted good in that service.

Two thirds think downtown is a safe place, but fewer than one third think it's safe to walk down there alone at night. Fully 30% think the police bureau's internal discipline system is bad, compared to 35% who give it a positive rating. For 68% of those surveyed, driving alone in a car was their primary mode of transportation; biking was 4%.

Portland was rated a good place to do business by 57%. As usual, more people said their opportunity to affect city decisions was bad than those who said it was good.

In deciding how much weight to give these findings in formulating our own opinions, we found the demographics of the survey set interesting. There were 3,468 survey returns counted. Females outnumbered males 61% to 39%, 65% had graduated college, and 87% were white.