One of the ways city council has used to gauge public opinion of the proposed downtown arena is by phone calls and emails to the city’s general information line, 311. It’s been pointed out on Twitter that the majority of the calls have been in support of the arena, but I wanted to look a little deeper and see if there’s more of a story to be told here.

This information is provided by the city, who has kept a day-by-day record of the calls to 311, categorized as either in support of the downtown arena, supportive with conditions, or against the arena. There have also been calls just asking for more information, and I won’t be considering those here.

The Numbers

Between February 20 and today there have been a total of 5373 calls expressing an opinion, with 2689 for the arena, 343 supportive with conditions, and 2341 opposed. You can choose for yourself how to count the “supportive with conditions” people. I think the smart way is to count them as people who like the idea of an arena, but don’t like the current deal as it stands. I count myself in this category.

Let’s graph the calls on a week-by-week basis:

There’s a spike between March 31 and April 6, and relative to that the volume of calls is quite small. Let’s zoom in a bit so we can see the detail on an average day.

Aside from early April, on any given week there has always been more calls opposed to the arena than supporting it. Let’s look at the opinions expressed as a percentage of the total calls:

The Reason

The vast spike in calls from March 31 to April 6 is a result of a campaign organized by the Oilers, which urged supporters to call 311. I heard reports on Twitter that this included advertisements during Oilers games. This also spawned a counter-campaign that led to the spike of calls against the arena. If we ignore calls received during this period in early April, the statistics are: 339 for the arena, 157 supportive with conditions, and 1450 against. In the last four weeks, the calls break down as: 179 for, 51 supportive with conditions, and 507 against.

I would caution city council to be sure they look at the data in more detail, and consider that as I had suspected support of the arena has waned in recent months.