The answer to those questions can be found in the responses to the citizen survey that the Unified Government distributed and collected in March and April of this year.
In the remainder of this post I'm going to describe the survey and share one huge result that knocked my socks off. In the next post, I'll dive deeper into the survey results and in the third post in this series, I'll explain why those results led me to "The Year of BIC" (Blight reduction / Infrastructure improvement / Communication). I'll also describe how I think this initiative gives us the road map to a better life in Wyandotte County.
I was one of several Commissioners who successfully lobbied in 2014 for the UG to resume routine surveys of county citizens. We (UG) hadn't completed a comprehensive county-wide survey since 2000 and I just don't believe we can truly improve our level of service delivery if we don't periodically ask, "How are we doing?"
We completed our first survey in 2014 and repeated the process with another survey in March and April of this year. Our goal now is to complete a new survey every two years moving forward.
We contracted with ETC Institute in Olathe to distribute the surveys and to collect and analyze the results. The folks at ETC specialize in surveying citizens about satisfaction with delivery of government services and throughout their history, they have surveyed over 2 million people in more than 850 across 49 states.
Our survey was 6 pages long and contained several dozen questions that asked citizens to rate their satisfaction with the delivery of city and county government services by the Unified Government.
Survey responses were gathered by mail, phone and the internet. A total of over 2,900 surveys were completed and ETC ensured that at least 300 surveys were completed in each of the 8 Commission districts. Here's a map that shows the approximate "scatter" of responses from across the county.
We collected enough surveys to insure that the margin of error within the results was very small (plus or minus 2% for the answers to any given question). We also have enough data to "drill down" as deep as the neighborhood level in terms of how people answered.
The demographic results indicate that people who completed the surveys were very representative of the overall county population in terms of things like age, income, race, gender, etc.
Here are a handful of graphs that describe the 2,900+ total survey respondents as a group.
The last thing I'll share today is one set of results that absolutely hit me like a ton of bricks.
I invite you to click on the graphic below to enlarge it and then take a long look at all the results. For each question, the blue bar represents responses from our 2016 survey, the red bar represents responses ETC has gotten to the same question from communities all around the KC metro area and the yellow bar represents responses ETC has gotten from communities all around the United States.
Today, I'm only going to focus on the first question. It asked people to rate their satisfaction with the Overall Quality of Life in Wyandotte County on a 5-point scale ranging from "Very Satisfied" to "Very Dissatisfied".
Only 37% of our survey respondents indicated that they were Satisfied or Very Satisfied with the overall quality of life in Wyandotte County!
That's about half the number of "satisfied" responses from communities across the United States and I believe it is simply unacceptable. The rest of the survey results will help us identify several factors in Wyandotte County that I believe are shaping this negative perception. If we can successfully address those factors, I believe we'll substantially improve quality of life in Wyandotte County.
Easier said than done, I know.
That's all for today. In my next post, I'll share more survey results and tell you why I believe 2017 needs to be "The Year of BIC".
~ Brian
Email: bmckiernan@wycokck.org
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