Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
November 24, 2009
Last week, I presented the results of our recent citizen survey. Admittedly, I presented mostly positive numbers in last week’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:
- 87% are pleased with O’Fallon’s quality of life
- 77% are pleased with overall quality of City services
- 92% are pleased with O’Fallon as a place to live
- 41% feel they are getting good value for the City taxes they pay
- 46% feel the City does a good job welcoming citizen involvement
- 42% feel the City does a good job listening to citizens.
What’s wrong with this picture? Residents who rate City services rated as “excellent” also say they are not getting good value from those services. One could claim this is 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 9th percentile. That means 91% 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 92% of survey respondents rated the public schools as “good” or “excellent.”
As I have reported numerous times in this blog, St. Clair County is negatively impacted by out-of-control Township Multipliers caused by the lack of regular assessments throughout the county. Nobody likes property taxes, but St. Clair County seems to be unique (in Illinois anyways) with dramatic Multiplier increases.
Perhaps residents were expressing their dissatisfaction with the total increase of their property tax bill and not necessarily connecting it to any particular taxing body (city, schools, or otherwise). We have found that many residents are not very well informed on the intricacies of government funding and that your property tax bill is divided up into autonomous governmental agencies such as the city, schools, county, SWIC, and so on.
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:
|
Excellent |
Good |
Don’t Know |
Fair |
Poor |
The value for taxes paid to the City |
4% |
32% |
13% |
34% |
18% |
Job City does at welcoming citizen involvement |
5% |
30% |
23% |
29% |
12% |
Job City does at listening to citizens |
4% |
27% |
26% |
28% |
15% |
What strikes me about these numbers is the high percentage of clustering around “Good” and “Fair” and the percentage of people who don’t know. 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.
The survey indicates that 89% of residents read the City’s quarterly newsletter and 66% have visited the City’s web site, so perhaps we should use these communication tools to inform residents and solicit more feedback.
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. In our current environment of revenue shortfalls, there have been several discussions among staff and the City Council regarding what are the City’s core services and how we should spend our decreasing revenues. This survey provides some insight and gives us clues on how we can improve our performance.
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