Poll by Vt. Yankee owner called biased
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By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau - Published: October 12, 2007
MONTPELIER – A telephone survey apparently done this week on behalf of the Vermont Yankee plant's parent company, Entergy Nuclear, has irked some Vermonters who got the calls. They complained that the questions were slanted and designed more to influence their opinions than gauge them.
"If this wasn't a push poll I will eat my hat," said Marjorie Power, a Montpelier resident who happens to have once been a hearing officer for the Public Service Board that regulates utilities.
The poll comes as the state is in the midst of its own separate effort to evaluate where residents believe Vermont should get its electricity in the future, after contracts with Yankee and Hydro-Quebec dry up over the next decade.
Rob Williams, a Yankee spokesman, said Entergy did do a telephone poll in Vermont this week. But it is unrelated to the state's "public engagement process" on energy and was not a push poll, he said.
"We occasionally take public opinion polls," he said. "Entergy conducts polls at all of its locations. We have done some here over the years."
"It is to gauge public opinion. It is not a push poll whatsoever," he said.
Williams declined to release details of the poll questions or its results.
Push polling is a technique that has become fairly common in political campaigns, in which likely voters are asked if different scenarios would make them more or less inclined to vote against a candidate. While political push polls are designed to put negative information out about a candidate, the poll apparently done by Charlton Research for Entergy seemed more designed to get positive information about the company out to the public, Power said.
For instance the caller asked if she would be more likely to support a new operating liscence for the Vermont Yankee plant if she know that the company provides jobs in Vermont, has a security force on the site or makes power without producing greenhouse gases, Power said.
"Periodically they would keep asking me the same questions, what I thought about their reliscencing," Power said.
The Vermont Department of Public Service is making its own telephone calls as part of the public engagement process now taking place in the state, but those calls sound quite different, said Stephen Wark, spokesman for the regulatory agency. Those calls are designed to find Vermonters willing to join regulators and experts during a weekend long workshop on energy policy. There is also a series of public hearings around the state during the month on the issue, the results of which will help lawmakers and regulators decide where Vermont should get its electricity.
It is not infrequent or bad that businesses do polls, but he hopes residents don't confuse the Entergy poll with the work being done by the state, Wark said.
"It's unfortunate timing," he said. "We don't want to confuse it with what the state has been working on really hard for the better part of 18 months."
A group of energy experts and advocates worked together to make sure the questions in the state's workshops do not push respondents to particular answers, Wark said.
"There was a lot of discussion about how to ask the questions so as not to lead people," he said.
Kendall Gifford, who works for the Windham Regional Commission on housing, transportation and community development issues, also got the call apparently from Entergy's polling firm.
The questions were "really bizarre" he said.
"It was clearly not a legitimate get-your-honest-opinion poll," he said. "I could not tell for sure where it came from or what the intent was."
If the goal of the survey was to change his mind it seemed "a kind of crude way to do it" he said.
Drew Hudson, field director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group which advocates for the use of renewable energy like wind power, said the poll may have been a response to opposition to nuclear power at the first public engagement hearing held in St. Johnsbury last week.
"It is understandable that Vermont Yankee is concerned about their future in the state," he said. "We wish they would have just trusted the people to look at the data and come to the right conclusion as we do"
Power said the call made her less likely to support a new operating license for the Vernon nuclear plant.
"I oppose it even more that they are going to such great lengths to convince me," she said. "At first I thought it was a regular opinion poll but the slant of the questions was so obvious."
More information about the state's public engagement process on the energy future of the state can be found at www.vermontsenergyfuture.info.
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