- May 4, 2024
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Palm Coast residents overwhelmingly rate the city as a good place to live, and have identified safety and the economy as priorities for the city in the coming two years.
The city of Palm Coast emailed 1,336 copies of the annual National Citizen Survey to residents last fall, and got 445 of them back.
This year was the 14th year the city has held the citizen survey, City Administration Coordinator Denise Bevan told City Council members at a Feb. 23 workshop, and the city is considering doing it less often — perhaps every other year instead of every year. The survey cost about $9,000 or $10,000 to implement in 2011, Bevan said, but the proposed cost for next year is about $15,000.
Councilman Bill McGuire praised city staff's work on the survey, but questioned how useful it actually is, particularly since the city has no way of telling how much consideration respondents are actually putting into filling it out.
"To be very blunt about it, I don’t see where this survey helps me to be a better city councilman," McGuire said. "I mean, it’s interesting, it’s somewhat provocative, but it’s not conclusive."
Palm Coast Mayor Jon Netts suggested the council consider doing the full survey every other year, but doing more detailed topical surveys in the intervening years.
Councilman Steve Nobile liked that approach.
"It’s good data," Nobile said. "My only opinion is we need to drill down more on certain areas, so we can start looking at actionable points."
Survey responses on the big questions were generally positive: A total of 26% of respondents rated the city as having an excellent quality of life and 51% said it had a good quality of life, while 21% rated it as having a fair quality of life and just 2% rated it as having a poor quality of life. (See the full results here: http://bit.ly/1p0KULD.)
The survey had more than 300 questions, not including demographic ones. Most of the questions are standard nationwide, but the city was added a few of its own custom questions this year.
The city also rolled out a new web version of the survey, but its results are unscientific. The web survey was taken 718 times, but the city had no way to keep respondents from taking it more than once. (See the results of the web survey here: http://bit.ly/1oF3g4M.)
These characteristics of the city were rated "excellent" or "good" by 80% or more of respondents on the National Citizen Survey:
These characteristics of the city were rated "excellent" or "good" by 40% or less of respondents on the 2015 National Citizen Survey:
Ratings that went up 7% or more from last year:
Ratings that went down 7% or more from last year:
About 80% of respondents said they would be willing to pay higher taxes for stormwater and drainage. Here's the full list of things more than 60% of respondents said they would be willing to pay increased taxes for:
