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A poll conducted by the Collier Building Industry Association shows that while growth is a top concern, only 10 percent of people favor laws to stop building.

What a surprise.

A poll can yield just about any result its sponsor wants, so long as the question is phrased properly.

Generally speaking (a term that turns up often in the CBIA survey) the group’s pollster did a fair job of posing balanced questions to the 409 randomly selected registered voters contacted from May 23 through May 26.

But even balanced questions can produce spinnable results.

For example, pollster Paul Fallon of Fallon Research drew this conclusion from the work he did for his CBIA clients. “Voters here don’t seem to support a lot of stringent government regulations.”

That’s debatable. True, only 10 percent of respondents supported the option, “Pass laws to stop any further growth,” as the best way to manage growth. But 38 percent chose, “Develop stricter regulations to slow growth,” and 35 percent selected, “Encourage growth, but manage it more carefully through more controls.” Whatever semantic difference the CBIA might want to draw between “develop stricter regulations,” and “manage it more carefully through more controls,” the fact is 83 percent of voters favor tighter control of development.

Only 13 percent think adequate controls are in place.

The CBIA poll did not ask the mother of all growth-management questions. Nor did it need to. County commissioners voted last week to go straight to the source with the question, “State growth management law permits new development to proceed under certain circumstances even if adequate road capacity will not exist for 3 to 5 years. Should this law be changed to require adequate road capacity before new development can begin?”

It will appear on the Nov. 7 ballot as a non-binding straw poll. Margin of error, 0 percent. No one will be surprised if a majority of voters punch, “Yes.”

That will lead to a discussion of how to pay for the roads, another spin zone within the CBIA survey.

The CBIA presents the concept of impact fees in a three-question sequence beginning with, “As you may or may not know, the county has a policy that charges money each time a new home is built to defray the costs of government services created by growth for things such as schools, libraries and roads. The charges are known as impact fees. Generally speaking, do you favor or oppose this policy?” Seventy-one percent favor it.

Support for impact fees appears to waver, however, at the second question, “At this time, the county has a total of 13 different impact fees that it charges, which add about $28,000 to the price of a new home in Collier County. In your opinion is the county charging too much, about the right amount or too little in impact fees?” Fifty-two percent said too much.

By the time the third question is asked, support for impact fees becomes as shallow as the Tadpole Pool — built with impact fees — at the new Sun-N-Fun Lagoon water park.

When asked, “Would you favor or oppose limiting the amount that the county can charge in impact fees, so that there are not any further increases in the cost of new homes?” two-thirds of respondents favored such a cap.

Of course, the second question doesn’t indicate how much it actually costs to provide the things such as schools, libraries and roads that growth necessitates and the third implies that without impact fees, there would be no increases in home costs, ignoring the reality of the rising cost of materials, labor and land.

The CBIA poll is released every two years just before the elections for County Commission and School Board. When crafting positions based on the survey, candidates would do well to bear in mind the source.

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E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com.