Last week we spent four articles talking about the opinions of Lake Forest residents on services in the City. Here are the highlights –
In terms of quality of life, 55% of the residents think the quality is “excellent” but 6 out of 10 cities have more residents who describe their quality of life as “excellent”.
In terms of satisfaction with city services, 63% are “very satisfied” but 4 out of 10 cities have more residents who are “very satisfied”.
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In terms of communication, 81% are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” but 4 of 11 cities have more residents who rate themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with efforts by the City to communicate with them.
In terms of listing things that should be changed, there was a higher consensus in Lake Forest than in any other city, with more than 10% of the residents selecting two areas (parks and traffic) that needed improvement.
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Methodological issues make it difficult to draw any real conclusions from these surveys, even while they do provide some data. Some areas that are important to residents are not adequately addressed, and it's clear that some of the people responding to the questionnaire do not really know what city services are and what they are not.
The bottom line from our previous discussions is that we seem to be doing OK, although there were a whole host of important areas that were not covered in the survey. And while we seem to be doing OK, there are certainly cities that consistently receive higher scores than we get, across the boards, so on a comparative basis we appear to be in the middle of the pack, at least with regards to the 11 other California cities surveyed by True North in the recent past.
Despite these respectable results, we’ve been led to believe by city officials that we are living in Shangri-La and everything is great. In some respects, it’s similar to the sham that city officials attempted when for years they touted Lake Forest as “one of the safest cities in the U.S.” See my previous articles for that boondoggle. The attempt to portray us as significantly better than we actually are is not some innocent puffery. There are serious consequences. When public policy issues are raised, city officials invariably put them aside with the comment “Our report card indicates that people are very satisfied with (fill in the blank).” This has caused many issues to go unaddressed or to be dismissed, which is probably a core reason why, compared to our neighbors, we have so few resources (e.g., civic center, senior center,dog park, synchronized traffic lights, a nonprofit community foundation, etc.) If indeed the community is tickled pink with the way things are being done, there is no need to improve services. Yet how tickled pink is the community? Hundreds of people have shown up at City hall to complain about a myriad of issues. Dozens of people regularly comment about problems on the pages of The Patch and online at the OC Register. Less than 6 months ago, more than 4,000 registered voters showed their unhappiness with the City Council by signing a petition to reverse decisions made by the council. At the last election, more people ran for City Council than ever before, and with the exception of the lone incumbent, all of them asked for change (BTW - the incumbent Rudolph was defeated as was Dixon in the previous election!). Why would we need change if everything is so great?
Things are not so great. We aren’t one of the safest cities in the U.S. That doesn’t mean life is terrible and by all accounts things are good. But they can be better. City officials consistently try to ignore this fact and continually tell us how great things are. It’s time we looked at ourselves in the mirror, accept the blemishes, and do our best to correct what needs improvement. We can start by redesigning the way the City gets feedback about resident satisfaction. In this day it’s seems ludicrous to be doing phone surveys of 400 randomly selected registered voters every two years.
