Owen Sound city hall. (photo by Claire McCormack)
Owen Sound has received the results of its first-ever citizen satisfaction survey.
Council heard a delegation from William Schatten and Winsome Stek of Forum Research at its meeting Monday night and also received a report about the survey from the city’s manager of strategic initiatives and operational effectiveness Michelle Palmer.
A total of 401 interviews were completed by telephone when the survey was conducted by Forum Research between July 12 and 30. Another 908 individuals took part in a supplemental online questionnaire. According to Forum Research, the margin of error of the survey is plus or minus 3.64 percentage points.
Palmer’s report says the majority of respondents (74 per cent) rated their quality of life in Owen Sound as either good or excellent. However, about 4 in 10 phone survey respondents (39%) and 52 per cent of online respondents felt the quality of life in Owen Sound has become worse in the past three years.
More affordable housing, cost of living and homelessness was identified as the top issue facing Owen Sound by a plurality of respondents (29%).
Seventy-five per cent of people surveyed expressed satisfaction with the services delivered by the city.
Parks and trails were the top service overall that residents were most satisfied with (87 per cent), followed by library (84 per cent) and fire (83 per cent).
Harrison Park was identified as the most popular service utilized by residents who took part in the survey, followed by the harbour and other waterfront areas.
Roads and sidewalks (46 per cent) and winter maintenance of sidewalks (45 per cent) were among the city services survey respondents were least satisfied with.
As for importance of services, respondents rated fire services and winter road maintenance the most important (93 per cent) while airport services was the least important, according to Palmer’s report.
Owen Sound is currently in the midst of a process to attempt to divest the city-owned Billy Bishop Regional Airport on Highway 26.
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On balancing the cost of city services and taxation, the plurality of residents would prefer to maintain taxes or reduce services and programs (44%). Police and fire services (26%) were identified as the top choices of responding residents as the services they would want to reduce in order to maintain taxes.
Owen Sound Mayor Ian Boddy says the survey data provides “building blocks” and interesting things to be examined at the committee level to see what the city can build from.
“Two things that come out of it … are things that we need to work on to increase satisfaction. The other thing that I note is there are some things that we do better than we’re being perceived to have done and we’re not communicating those things,” Boddy says.