Mayor Taveras' Support Drops In New Brown Poll

Mayor Taveras' Support Drops In New Brown Poll

In his first ten months in office, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras has closed schools, fired (and rehired) every teacher in the school system and declared the city a “category five fiscal hurricane.” Now a Brown University has found that for the first time, he appears to be facing some negative feedback from the residents that overwhelmingly voted him into office last year.

Almost 48 percent of voters rated Taveras’ job performance as excellent or good, while 44 percent rated his performance as only fair or poor. Nearly 21 percent said they had a more favorable opinion of the Mayor than they did ten months ago when he took office, but a quarter of the respondents said they had a less favorable opinion of him.

Brown Political Science Professor Marion Orr said he was surprised by the numbers, but noted that the Mayor has been forced to make difficult decisions that may have resulted in a slight loss in support.

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“I would say I was surprised,” Orr said. “This was the first poll [of strictly Providence voters] conducted since he took office and I had a general sense that people were generally satisfied. But some of the decisions he has had to make may have had a negative impact.”

The Numbers

The survey was conducted Sept. 16-23 by researchers at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. It is based on a citywide random sample of 435 registered voters in Providence. Overall, the poll had a margin of error of about plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

While the city was divided on Taveras, almost 56 percent of voters said they disagreed with the decision to close four public schools earlier this year. The city claimed it would save more than $12 million, although that number has yet to be achieved.

According to the poll, voters were generally satisfied with public services in the city. For example, 79 percent said they were very satisfied or satisfied with garbage collection, about 64 percent felt the same way about neighborhood police presence, nearly 89 percent felt similarly about fire and ambulance service, and 60 percent replied similarly regarding parks in Providence.

Less than 38 percent of voters said they were satisfied with the city’s schools and only about 26 percent said they were satisfied with the roads in their neighborhood.

Not Much Has Changed

A statewide poll conducted by Brown earlier this year found Taveras to be among the most popular politicians in Rhode Island. But while the new numbers show a decline, Quest Research pollster Victor Profughi said he doesn’t believe much has changed.

“Tavares won the primary with 49% of the vote; the poll simply shows that nothing much may have changed--44% have not changed their opinion, 21% are more favorable and 26% less favorable than they were 10 months ago,” Profughi said. “Without a cross tab of how they voted it's impossible to tell if anything has changed at all.”

Profughi said the public services questions may have netted to most interesting results.
“Relative to service quality, Brown sought opinion opinions on city services in March, 1999 when Buddy Cianci was Mayor,” he said. “Reactions were nearly identical with those found in the most recent survey for every single city service for which comparative data is available.”

 

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