7-a - Report on the Orange County Tax Equity Study

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CCM Economics, LLC Orange County Tax Equity Page 38 To see this return to the example of the Chapel Hill Public Library. Of the people self- identifying as being from Chapel Hill, approximately 10% stated that they never used the Chapel Hill library. Of the people self-identifying as being from Carrboro, again approximately 10% stated that they never used the facilities. However, it’s possible that this 10% of the people from Chapel Hill and Carrboro who stated that they don’t use the Chapel Hill Public Library use one of the other library facilities such as the Main Library in Hillsborough.22 Or take the example of Hillsborough’s residents and their stated use of the Orange County Medical facilities. Of the 95 responses, 5 indicated that they have used the Dental Clinic, 11 had used the medical clinic in Hillsborough, and 2 had used the medical clinic in Chapel Hill. Therefore, 5.2% had used the Dental Clinic, 11.57% had used the Hillsborough branch of the Medical Clinic, and 2.1% had used the Chapel Hill Medical Clinic. To see how total usage of county services could be higher than is implied from Table 7 imagine that there is a city with only two residents, ‘Able’ and ‘Barb’. Abe states in the survey that he never uses the Passmore Senior Center but that he does use the Seymour Senior Center— Barb states the exact opposite. This would show in the Table 6 usage table as 50% usage of both of the facilities, when actually 100% of the senior citizen center facilities are being used by the residents. Therefore, the survey respondents’ use of public facilities is shown in a different way in Table 8. Table 8 calculates the maximum possible usage of county provided services based upon the survey results and assuming that survey respondents were exclusive in their usage.23 22 Recall from Table 7 that approximately 16% of people who reside in Chapel Hill and 27% of people who reside in Carrboro stated that they use the Main Library in Hillsborough. 23 As another option, the survey could have had an individual question for each different park, medical facility, library, etc. rather than grouping them into similar categories to avoid this problem of exclusive usage. This would have added 18 additional questions to the survey though and more than doubled its length and thus lowered the response rate. 75