City council was presented with the results of the municipality’s 2023 Citizen Satisfaction Survey during its regular meeting on March 20, indicating residents are most concerned about health care services, traffic flow and control, recreational facilities, and lower taxation.
The results provide the City with a report card on how they are performing in their service delivery and help to identify areas for improvement. Once again, the survey was administered by Y Station, a third-party research and communications firm based in Edmonton.
The marketing firm gathered both telephone and online responses from 400 Airdronians to generate a statistically valid sample, which was presented to council during the meeting. The survey was collected together with an open survey from Jan. 9 to 27 gathering insights on residents’ quality of life, top concerns and priorities, and overall satisfaction with City services.
“This year’s results are relatively consistent with the results from last year’s survey, though the 5-year trend shows an overall reduction in satisfaction levels with quality and efficiency of services, as well as managing growth and development,” read a council agenda report.
According to Tracy With, chief operating officer of Y Station, the City ranked high in terms of quality of life with 73 per cent of residents rating 4 or 5 out of 5 for satisfaction, which is comparable to last year’s findings.
“We see we had a bit of a boost in those that felt [their quality of life] had remained the same over the past 12 months, with 30 per cent saying it had decreased,” shared With. “This is a nice recovery to see the decreased category go down and the remain the same category go up – it's a very encouraging number for us to look at.”
An increase in quality of life can be accounted to easing public health restrictions after the COVID-19 pandemic, and availability of City amenities, facilities, and services, according to With.
With said overall there is a lot of consistency in this year’s findings compared to last year.
“When we look at our trends over time, we did see some declines but a lot of consistency in our findings compared to 2022,” she said during the meeting. “We are really in recovery mode, and we can see that consistency has held true over the past year with no significant dips or dives in the data from 2022 to 2023.”
The top issues for the community accounted for in the survey include infrastructure and traffic (50%), healthcare (38%), and recreation amenities (19%). Additionally, the survey gathered perceptions of public safety, satisfaction with staff interaction and perceived value for taxes.
The marketing firm COO said the only item that saw a significant dip was the City’s management of community growth and development. She said the category appeared “on the radar” as a little bit higher concern than it had been in the previous year.
“Our biggest change or increase is that issue in terms of infrastructure, traffic, and roads,” she said. “Now that people are back on the roads again, we’re seeing that is coming top of mind again in the City.”
Additionally, residents voiced significant concern with Airdrie’s lack of a hospital facility, traffic congestion, increased criminal activity, and high or unaffordable cost of living.
“[Healthcare concern] has elevated really across the board in the last couple of years across the province,” explained With. “It’s not a surprise to see that a little bit higher in Airdrie in 2023.
“Safety is still a very key component of the image or brand of the City of Airdrie and 76 per cent of residents consider Airdrie a safe place to live overall – these are very high numbers.”
With noted another area needing improvement is the overall customer satisfaction with regard to City services.
“It has been tracking downward and we do see this in growing communities,” she shared. “It’s not a surprise when the population continues to get bigger, the pressure on the administration to handle those contacts increases just by sheer volume and the fact the community has also increased in size.”
The survey revealed the City’s recent website relaunch was met with positive reviews overall, said With. The website launch was a major initiative for the City last year, and the administration wanted to get a sense of the public’s perception of the new website, according to the report.
Overall, the main priorities noted by residents are improving health care, traffic, recreation facilities, and lower taxes.
“These are pretty common. We have heard these in the past, but definitely an increase in terms of traffic and traffic control coming out of our findings this year compared to the previous year,” she shared.
With said there is not a huge difference between the results of the statistically valid sample and the open survey.
“It’s really reassuring that when we do our sampling we’re finding a lot of those consistent findings in terms of quality of life, services and facilities, property taxes, and overall safety,” she said.
This year an additional 571 responses were received through the open survey that provided an opportunity for residents to opt in to complete the questionnaire. The open web survey is not random and not considered statistically valid and reliable.
“It gives every resident an opportunity to voice their opinions and provide the City with valuable feedback in the case they were not directly contacted by a member of Y Station’s team for the random sample,” concluded the report.
