pleased to welcome a members from the frost center to go over the completed resident survey that we had done this fall the results are in it's kind of award season with golden globes and oscars and those sorts of things i'm not quite sure this gets to that level of interest but nonetheless it's an interesting survey with interesting results so we welcome russia or thank you mayor and you might babbin in our office who has as done the leg work to get us to this point tonight is very helpful to to to what we're about ready to see i want to also thank you for comparing ourselves to national trends in other questions in ways that we have not yet seen in any other surveys to date so thank you very welcome and even thank you i have to bear with me i have a little bit of a cold but i'll try to get into this very briefly the methodology that the survey we conducted was a random phone number survey that was a city of holland residence and we particularly took extra steps to try and get a representative sample of the city residents and so that entailed using cell phone numbers in addition to landline numbers and using some lists  difficult to to get a hold of on the phone such as younger adults we screen for people that lived that lived in the city and also in the fo hundred forty three area we also asked people to list the nearest cross street as a another fallback to help ensure that the people that responded the survey and the results that we presented were representative of city residents ok so we had eight thousand four hundred ish numbers that we had originally some of those were business lines disconnects  had a final complete sample of five hundred eleven so a response rate of about thirty percent the margin of error for these results that are present is about four percent so you can think of what we have in our sample and say plus or minus four percent and that will tell you the range that we can say with high certainty that city residents hold their opinions on issues that we polled them for also this is  comparing to two thousand and ten census data we found that our survey was pretty close matched based on gender different age groups racial and hispanic is the makeup of the city of holland now under the questions we asked residents generally five sets of things some issues with respect to quality of life energy  taxes and issues facing the city such as policy and budget issues  with respect to the quality of life issues we asked residents what they liked most about holland and you got a breath of positive responses but over whelming majority  of those responses said that downtown was mentioned as something that they liked quite a bit about holland its access to lakes and beaches and the friendly and caring people that live in the city right when asked things that people might like to change about holland about one in four between those sixteen percent that didn't give a response or said they can come up with anything we have about one four that said they like holland just the way it is or can think of something to change and here you have a lot of infrequent comments about things that people would like to change but of those the most common were gangs and security or crime issues related to that we asked residents how safe they feel in the city and in their neighborhood specifically during the daytime and in the evening and we ask them to rate that i won where four is very safe and three is somewhat safe and what we found is about during the day ninety seven percent say that they feel very safe or somewhat safe and at the night time this drops off but very very minor drop off ninety percent still saying that they feel very safe or somewhat safe now to energy politics policy issues we asked people how familiar they were with the community energy plan and in general an eighty two percent said that they had little or no kno wledge about that energy plan as of the time that we conducted the survey so there might be more efforts there to get out the news and educate the citizens about these plans  we also ask them about their support for the city being involved in energy efficiency incentives that is providing incentives for homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient and there was overwhelming support for this with seventy percent saying they strongly support or the side that they strongly agree or agree with the city being involved in offering these kinds of incentive when asked about interest and learning more ways they can make their families sorry their homes more energy manage their site manage their family and home energy use and costs more effectively  again overwhelming said that they were very or somewhat interested with eighty nine percent giving one of those two responses we also asked people about their views and willingness to pay for renewable sources of energy and we got a variety of responses on how much people said they would be willing to pay for those  relative to how much they paid currently but if we look at the with only about six percent not responding refusing or didn't didn't know how to respond if we look at those that did respond  we find that a simple majority fifty one percent say that they are willing to pay more than what they currently pay for renewable sources of energy and if we look at the averages based on their responses we ha asked people are they willing to pay five percent ten percent fifteen percent twenty percent or more than twenty percent than what they currently pay and on average people in the city are willing to pay those that are willing to pay more they're willing to pay nine point two percent more than what they currently all right the next set of questions we asked had to do with us city policy and pending issues such as priorities that the city should put into different initiatives coming up right related to this we asked people what they thought the most important local issues were and the top of mind responses that people gaev had to do with energy or the power plant or renewable energy issues with a little more than one in four giving some response at the top of their head that had to do with that issue  also rounding out the next most frequent offered issues we had about one in five saying that taxes or budgeting was an important local issue that the city would face in the near future one in five saying jobs and about one in five saying schools as well city policy issues were asked first of which specifically had to do with overnight parking during the warmer months during summer and when asked whether or not yes or no they support such a policy we have a majority fifty five percent saying that they do in fact support overnight parking being offered and that's fifty five percent to thirty seven percent  no they do not support that another policy issue that was asked was how the city should respond to anti discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and we asked residen issues another would be to put it to a vote and the last would be to change the city ordinances to provide such protections and what we found is that a majority thirty seven percent of residents support taking no specific action at the city level but deferring to federal or state guidelines with thirty seven percent giving that and close behind then was thirty two percent or about a third  said that the city should change its ordinances to provide such protections and about one in five thought that it should be put to a vote on this  matter right we also asked residents to rate a number to give their view on how how much a number of issues should be prioritized that the city may be making some decisions on the near future and the most these issues are listed from top to bottom in the topic they had the highest support for residents should be given the highest level of priority and topping the list is improving the waterfront area particularly in the industrial section of the waterfront with that being giving a moderate high priority by  majority residents followed following that was renovating the pool bo's pool scuse me and the least support overall was for building an particular some other questions we were the city was interested in knowing more was reasons that people visit the civic center and what so its use is to the city residents  and what the city residents felt the city should do with the civic center in the in the near future and when asked if they visited the civic center the building in the past three years  we had about one in four responded they had not visited it in three years but the majority forty percent are the most frequent response forty percent was that they visited it for an indoor farmer's market event and then around a third saying that they went to the civic center for a show or exit bishan and then there's the other reasons coming given their two sporting events being about one  four and performances also coming up about one in five when asked what to do with the civic center building we asked residents should they build a new one leave it as it is demolish not replace or renovate the majority fifty five percent said that was the city should renovate the civic center and with about one in five twenty two percent between one five one four twenty two percent saying that a new civic center should be built all right next we asked residents about city services how satisfied they were with those and how much contact they had had with city employees if any and these were a number of servers city services that were rated on a scale of one to five scuse me thought that they were very good good average fare pore and good news is that all the services that were rated were considered to be average or slightly higher than that and all the way up to good to very good the services that were rated most highly at the top of the page there for those looking is the  parks in the city but also closely tying with that and others coming in close have to do with the public safety services so fire departments in mass and police all being rated very highly  one other point to to maybe draw out with this is that the civic center rec facilities when those are asked those had the lowest level of satisfaction  d also towards the and had to do with things about streets and storm drainage is but overall everything's considered average or above when asked if residents it had contact with city employees we had a little less than half about forty six percent saying that they had had some kind of contact recently and then we asked them to think of their most recent excuse me the most recent interaction and to rate the quality of that as very good good average poor or very poor and of those that had contact with city residents ninety percent said that there they were very satisfied with that interaction and with the service they received with ninety percent saying very good or good  just a breakdown of those departments very quickly about one in five to one in four contact the people had was with someone in the fire police public safety service departments followed by all right we asked residents several questions about taxes and city budget issues and there were a few questions that asked about people's views towards  services to trade off for for taxes such that people were asked would they want to keep their services as they are now if it meant even if it meant raising taxes to maintain those services where they want to keep their services as they are now but only if their taxes stay the same or somewhat reduce the services if it meant to keep their taxes the same and and so on  d with these what we found is that about thirty four percent said that they would be willing to pay more in taxes in order to maintain the services that they have currently about forty nine percent saying that they would only want to maintain the services they have currently if it meant their taxes would stay the same we asked a very similar question to this but you find that it's fairly comparable but that there is support for maintaining the services even at a higher tax rate goes up a little bit i could just flash back here we have about one third saying that for taxes  for services in general but about forty three percent saying that they'd be willing to pay more to maintain those public safety  services we also asked people for their level support for several are alternative models for our varying models i should say for how public safety and fire services may be provided and the highest level of support in our survey of city residents was for maintaining full time firefighters and that was followed by the next highest level support for  a model where cross training public safety officials to do different responsibilities other than their space the one that is in their partner and the least amount of support was for a volunteer  part time firefighters fleet ok when asked about support for city income tax if it meant they would be a reduction and property tax  among city residents forty one percent to thirty percent favor or support the idea of having a city tax city income tax with again thirty percent opposing  when asked about services that the city could possibly reduce only about sixteen percent said that they felt that there were such services and with the responses that came top of mind from those sixteen the most frequent one was sidewalk snow removal and another portion of them again saying that they can think of they think something should be reduced but couldn't think of something of anything in particular  the so these were somewhat and infrequent responses but nonetheless the way to view this is that the most common commonly offered top of mind response out there in the in the community was the sidewalk snow removal and other way to look at this and i would encourage the councils to look at the the breath of comments that you received for suggestions and that might give you a bit of a variety of of ideas to kind of pull together right in similar sized cities across the us we purchased some data comparing where possible and we were able to find matches on seventeen questions that were asked in the last six years nonetheless they help to give sort of a general normative information about where the city of holland falls in its responses relative to similar size and the similar size cities i should say are twenty five to fifty thousand population so holland falls right in the middle there right and i know this is awfully small it's a hard way to kind of present it  t overall cross that the seventeen areas we found that holland is doing relatively well for most of the seventeen items that we could fine comparison data  on such as night time safety feeling safe during the nighttime hours they were above relative to other cities of similar size rating of the quality of city  city council was much higher than in similar sized cities and another one that was much higher animal control street snow removal and  satisfaction with sidewalks were much higher in the city holland than comparable sized cities across the us a few areas just three where the of holland did a little bit or much well perform a little bit lower than relative to similar size cities had to do with  the civic center in particular and it might be worth noting that out of fifty eight comparison cities that were available the city of holland's coming in at the very bottom with satisfaction there having said that you know referring back to earlier the rating was average people thought the civic center satisfaction with that was just generally average so it's not that it's terrible but  relative to other cities it is towards the bottom of the list ratings on fire department services were below a little bit below where the the average city of a similar size and there we had about sixty eight comparison cities now if you remember back to this city satisfaction section that was satisfaction with fire services is one of the highest things  o with an average of from responses from the city residents being very good to very good so it's just this just goes to show i guess that people in lots of cities the size of holland tend to be very very happy with their fire services and the one other area where the city of holland according to our survey relative to others cities of similar size comes in a bit behind is with their level of contact with city of holland employees now this is less frequent than other cities but if you look at how satisfied people are with the city council and the overall ratings of city services you see that there holland is much above compared to other similar sized cities so maybe the way to to read that is is that people are pretty happy with the services and they're not coming to see city employees to complain and i also look back to some of the data we presented were that forty six percent that had contact with the city employee recently ninety percent said that they were very satisfied with that their customer service and that experience so so overall people are very happy with those interactions and perhaps because of that don't feel quite as much need to hunt down city employees and certainly not complain as much i suppose all right with that is there any any questions or anything i should try  for the record the slides that we've been reviewing tonight as well as a bunch of additional ones are on the city's web page and they're accessible right from the home page and i don't know if you do this or not gerri we're going to take the video of your presentation and also link that very same page so not only can folks look at the slides they can watch this presentation with the slides sort of in their hand as well also questions for gerri are comments and the survey itself we did have a study session discussion about this a few weeks ago so the council's review this a bit more but david really quick question relative to your your last statement you know the complete survey use substantially longer than this source in office so you folks at frost and i think that what we're getting here is good data that least we can rely upon it i think we're asking the kinds of questions we needed to have answered and i think this will be helpful for us as we look forward to trying to get some policy decisions in the city and you know it's been at least five years since we've done a citizen survey and quite frankly i think this is a that the kinds of questions we asked in this particular one i think are probably more helpful to us as we try to deal with some of the issues that are before us and appreciate your work on it so thank you all right is there discussion on it all in favor of so doing please say i i pose the same it is accepted for purposes of information