The Kent City Council plans to use the results of an extensive survey of 511 residents by a consultant to help focus on ways to make the city better.
Kent needs to improve three major areas – livability, government performance and infrastructure (street, sidewalk) maintenance, said Nathan Wiggin, project director for Seattle-based Northwest Research Group, during a report Tuesday to the council.
Under livability, Wiggin pointed to several areas that the survey showed residents want better results.
“Sense of community, affordability of housing in the city and the vibrancy of downtown Kent are the three areas you can focus on to help improve your residents’ opinion,” Wiggin said.
Renters had low ratings for sense of community while people who have emigrated to Kent and people of color gave the city higher ratings.
“It’s something I know you guys are working on and something that is being addressed, and there is no one area where people have an issue that stands out,” Wiggin said about downtown vibrancy. “It’s just a general feeling that they want a more vibrant downtown.”
As far as affordable housing, Wiggin said that’s a regional problem that no one has found an answer for.
The second key area to improve is government performance. Wiggin said the council can do two things to boost that rating.
“Having a clear vision and strategy for the future and being accountable and transparent as a government,” he said.
About one-quarter of the residents say the city is doing a poor job of providing clear vision.
“They are not saying they disagree with the vision but that they don’t know what the vision is,” Wiggin said.
On infrastructure maintenance, Wiggin said the survey shows people want cleaner streets and better maintenance of sidewalks and walkways.
For its survey, Northwest Research Group pulled 15,000 city addresses and randomly selected a crosscut of single-family and multifamily addresses across Kent. Some were reached by phone and others by mail and encouraged to respond online.
A total of 208 responded online, 161 by cellphone and 142 by land line. The survey has a confident rating of 95 percent with a 4.3 percent margin of error. That means if you do 100 surveys, the percentages would not change more than about 4 percent one way or the other.
Individuals spent nearly 30 minutes on the survey, rating the city in numerous areas. The respondents included people of various ages and incomes.
The city paid $45,000 to Northwest Research Group to conduct the survey and analyze the results, according to city documents.
Kent received an overall rating of 3.5 on a 1 to 5 scale. The overall rating was based on five questions about overall quality of life; the overall quality of services provided by the city; how Kent compares to other cities as a place to live; if the city is headed in the right or wrong direction; and whether people feel they are getting their money’s worth out of the taxes they pay.
“A 5-star city is an utopia,” Wiggin said. “It doesn’t actually exist. I have never seen one. It is literally perfect. We ask on a 0 to 10 scale and you have to get a 9 or 10 on every question from citizens.”
Wiggin said the 3.5 rating for Kent is a good score.
“When you compare your results to results of other people across the United States, the attitudes and opinions of people who live in Kent are similar to the attitudes and opinions of other people who feel they live in 3.5 star communities,” he said. “This is actually a pretty positive place to be. You are very close to bumping up to a 4 star.”
Kent had not done an extensive resident survey since 2006 when it had a population of 86,000, said Michelle Wilmot, city spokeswoman, in her report to the council. She said the city now has more than 125,000 residents.
“Given that we haven’t done this in 10 years, this is going to be a tremendous tool,” Wilmot said. “It will help us with our decision making, our strategic planning and give us a strong baseline if we continue to do these surveys over the years. … we can measure our progress.”
City staff plans to publish the complete survey results on the city website at kentwa.gov.
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