Nearly four years after the last city of Oak Harbor staff survey was conducted, Communications Officer Magi Aguilar is spearheading a new version to check in with city employees.

At the city council meeting Tuesday, Aguilar said she hopes to move forward with an in-house survey later this year.

While the new survey isn’t in response to perceived problems, it will stand in comparison to the October 2021 morale survey under former Mayor Bob Severns. That effort was initiated in response to council concerns about the rate of staff turnover and laid bare what some employees described as a toxic environment.

Three years later, in November 2024, Mayor Ronnie Wright claimed in a State of the City address that he turned things around and that staff morale was at an all-time high.

“We have over the last 11 months changed that culture,” he said. “People are happy and excited to get up and come to work every day. People want to stay in their jobs, and that’s what I want for our community.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Councilmember Eric Marshall questioned whether the new survey will be completely anonymous. Aguilar noted that “every IP address can be traced back to a city computer,” but she reassured him that’s not the purpose of requiring a unique address for each response.

“The purpose of the IP address is so that you can only take it once,” she said.

City Administrator Sabrina Combs added that there is only one staff member who is technically skilled to look at IP addresses.

“We won’t have that data in the survey tool that Magi would have access to, and so that’s how we would limit that access to that information,” she said.

All data will be handled internally to reduce the cost to the city, Aguilar said, since working with a consultant could cost more than $10,000.

“The purpose of the employee survey is pretty simple: It’s to better understand the concerns and the priorities of our staff,” Aguilar said during the presentation. “The goal is to gather all this information from our staff, identify morale, communication, some concerns, operations and highlight some of the best practices, some of our strengths, because we want to stay on par as well.”

Aguilar said she is qualified to lead the survey project.

“As your communications officer, I have formal and extensive training and experience in survey design, data analysis and strategic planning,” she said. “This experience will allow us to conduct a professional data driven survey without the expense of hiring consultants.”

Several council members expressed their enthusiasm for Aguilar to lead the project in-house, noting her qualifications for the role.

Together with Combs and HR Director Emma House, Aguilar is creating a plan to develop and manage the process internally, after gathering data on staff surveys in other municipalities and cities.

The presentation to council highlighted the potential to offer incentives to promote staff participation in the survey.

The communications officer also outlined a plan to create a committee called the “Staff Survey Response Team,” which can create actionable solutions from the survey results. This team, she said, will be made up of staff members from each department who will have access to the results.

Once the cross-departmental committee reviews the results and comes up with recommended solutions, Aguilar will return to council with a clear summary and recommendations. The results, Aguilar added, will be presented in aggregate form, with all responses organized as statistics and percentages.

Wright said his only involvement in the survey process was to suggest the creation of a committee.

“I don’t want to just have a survey and then have results,” the mayor said. “So I recommended that we form a committee within our staff that works on the results that come out of the survey and then, you know, we can show the staff that this wasn’t just an effort for nothing. We’re going to have an ongoing effort to continue to affect morale in a positive way.”

Councilmembers Jim Woessner and Bryan Stucky noted their approval of incorporating the human resources department into the entire survey process in a meaningful way.

“HR’s the one who has to deal with a lot of the responses, right?” Woessner said. “They’re the ones who are going to, you know, have to lead the charge, in addressing things that come out of it. So it’s important, obviously, that we gather data in such a fashion that it becomes usable to them.”

Aguilar told the council she plans on revamping the survey plan so it reflects the council’s new input. She will bring the presentation to a workshop next week.