Citizen engagement survey reveals high marks for Calgary and city’s direction
Posted Nov 20, 2014 9:10 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The results are in and to the surprise of few, Calgarians like living here and approve of the direction the city is heading in.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Ipsos Reid revealed the 2014 Citizen Satisfaction Survey results at City Hall this morning.
Ninety-one per cent of respondents revealed they are proud to be a Calgarian, 87 per cent indicate the quality of life in our city is good, 86 per cent of Calgarians rated the city’s quality of service as consistently high, close to two-thirds of citizens said The City provides good value for their property tax dollars and infrastructure and roads remain at the top of the issue agenda, while transit was a close second.
Given some of the recent disasters that have plagued the city such as the September snow-storm (when the survey was taken) and the flood, Nenshi admits he thought those numbers would have been a little higher.
“One that I find fascinating is protection of river flooding, where you actually see 8 per cent of people saying spend less on that,” he said. “That’s not what I would have expected.”
Six city services saw significant improvement in satisfaction while overall satisfaction with the level and quality of City services and programs is down significantly (there was a five per cent decrease – 79 per cent in 2014 vs. 84 per cent in 2013).
Nine out of every 10 Calgarians agree that Calgary is on the right track to becoming a better city.
One highly contentious issue for some, bike lanes on city streets, there was only 29 per cent of people who felt the program in the city was important, 57 per cent said it was somewhat important while 14 per cent felt it wasn’t significant or important at all.
Sixty per cent of those polled found they would be willing to accept some kind of tax increase to maintain the current levels of service.
Nenshi admits one of the things they didn’t ask was how much they would be willing to green-light, telling reporters that’s for the budget engagement process.
“People are saying, look I understand that growth causes inflationary pressures and straight up inflation causes inflationary pressures so when you say to people should the taxes increase by growth plus inflationary, you get a very broad consensus of people saying ‘yeah that makes sense.” he said.
According to the Mayor, they will use some of these figures to help guide their budget deliberations which coincidentally start on Monday.
Ispos Reid surveyed 2,450 Calgarians, the margin of error was 2 per cent.
Breaking it down by quadrant, they interviewed 454 in the Northeast, 687 in the Northwest, 569 in the Southeast and 740 in the Southwest.
