In an attempt to understand Utah's Congressional and Legislative candidates' opinion on supporting cultural organizations, the Utah Cultural Alliance (UCA) has completed its 2006 candidate survey.

By “cultural”, we mean arts and humanities groups, archives, museums, zoological, botanical and natural history organizations, history and heritage organizations.

In September, we obtained the e-mail addresses of all candidates for Federal and State legislative office.  We created our survey online, using SurveyMonkey.com, and e-mailed each candidate a link to the survey.  A total of 312 e-mails were sent.  No special software was required to take the survey, but access to a computer and the Internet was necessary.  We received 33 returned e-mails, due to e-mail addresses that were no longer valid.  We also received responses from some former candidates who had withdrawn from the election.

On the survey, we asked nine questions; some were open-ended, and others offered multiple-choice responses.  These questions were chosen to help us understand the candidates’ knowledge about the cultural resources in their community, to ascertain their level of support for state cultural agencies, and to determine their legislative priorities.

We gave candidates three weeks to fill out the survey.  Ultimately, although over 60 candidates started the survey, we received approximately 40 complete responses.  The blank surveys are not included in our results.

All candidates were given an opportunity to complete the survey, and were made aware that their responses would be made available to our UCA membership and the general public.  We hope you will take a few minutes to review the responses included here, and we encourage you to VOTE on Tuesday, November 7!