Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
August 16, 2007
On Tuesday, I presented the results of our recent citizen survey. As was pointed out to me by some astute readers of my blog, I only discussed the positive ratings. Are there any negative ratings in the survey? Is the City hiding something?
Well, no. I presented positive numbers in Tuesday’s blog because the results from the survey are overwhelmingly positive. O’Fallon residents appear to be pleased with City services and enjoy living in O’Fallon.
However, we did receive some conflicting opinions in the survey, and I would like take some time here to explore those responses:
· 83% are pleased with O’Fallon’s quality of life
· 72% are pleased with overall quality of City services
· 90% are pleased with O’Fallon as a place to live
· 42% feel they are getting good value for the City taxes they pay
· 56% feel taxes are a major problem.
What’s wrong with this picture? Residents who rate City services rated as “excellent” also claim they are not getting good value from those services. One could claim that this just another case of people wanting everything but are not willing to pay for it, but compared to other cities around the country our rating on this question is in the 10th percentile. That means 90% of the cities rated higher.
The City of O'Fallon receives 11% of residents’ property tax bill and only 6% of that goes to the General Fund. If residents feel they are not getting good value for their property taxes, then this is primarily a communication problem. The City of O'Fallon has reduced its property tax rate every year for the last eight years and gets most of its revenue from sales tax (49%). Most of the property tax bill goes to the schools (64%), yet 86% of survey respondents rated the public schools as “good” or “excellent.”
The surveys were mailed to households in April, which is the same time as the public meetings and publicity over the township multiplier. Perhaps residents were expressing their dissatisfaction with the total increase of their bill and not necessarily connecting it to any particular taxing body (city, schools, or otherwise).
Going a little deeper into the statistics may reveal some clues. Below is the breakout for all of the questions in the Public Trust section of the survey:
|
Strongly agree |
Somewhat agree |
Neither agree nor disagree |
Somewhat disagree |
Strongly disagree |
I receive good value for taxes |
9% |
33% |
17% |
22% |
19% |
Pleased with overall direction |
15% |
37% |
20% |
19% |
10% |
City welcomes citizen involvement |
17% |
39% |
24% |
10% |
9% |
City listens to citizens |
13% |
29% |
25% |
17% |
16% |
What strikes me about these numbers is the high percentage of people who have no opinion about the questions. This means they either don’t know or don’t care. From my perspective, this is a communication breakdown. As a City government, maybe we have not done a good job of showing value to our residents. Beyond this survey, we need to find ways to gather more input from residents and communicate our activities to them.
One example of this is that all departments are training next week to kick off a new performance measurement program that should be an important tool in benchmarking our services to other cities around the country. Quantifying our performance should give us an opportunity to show whether residents are getting good value for their taxes.
In the end, I don’t know what it means when residents say they are not getting good value. Perhaps they are pleased with City services but just feel they are paying too much for them in taxes. But then the question is “Which taxes?” When we do our survey again, we plan to add some follow up questions that get more specific into residents’ attitudes toward City taxes.
All of this discussion should not cloud the fact that every other indicator in the citizen survey displayed positive opinions about O'Fallon and the city government. Ratings were high for all City departments and City employees and people enjoy living here. As city administrator, I will continue to demand that all of our operations provide high quality services and operate in the most efficient manner possible.
| 
