Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, most Airdrie residents rate their quality of life as “good” or “very good.”
In fact, according to the City of Airdrie’s annual Citizen Satisfaction Survey, 93 per cent of respondents rated their overall quality of life as high, up one per cent from last year.
“Overall, we are pleased that the citizens of Airdrie continue to enjoy a high quality of life and consider Airdrie a very safe place to live,” says Mayor Peter Brown, adding that the overall perception of community safety remained high at 92 per cent.
“We will be taking a deeper dive into all the survey results, recognizing areas of improvement and acting accordingly.”
Each January, the City of Airdrie conducts a Citizen Satisfaction Survey. Through this tool, residents provide the City their perspectives and opinions on issues related to their community, including:
- Overall quality of life in Airdrie;
- Satisfaction with City services and facilities;
- Satisfaction with City management and leadership;
- Neighbourhood safety;
- City communications and public engagement opportunities;
- Value for property taxes; and
- Top priorities for Airdrie
Just as in past years, Y Station Communications and Research surveyed 400 random respondents to make up the statistically valid sample of Airdrie’s population.
Alongside the statistically valid sample, the City received an additional 1,286 responses from the general public online survey.
According to Ryan Johnson, corporate strategy advisor with the City of Airdrie, City employees strive to provide excellent customer service to citizens and the community to achieve a high quality of life rating year-over-year and this survey helps them accomplish that.
However, he adds there were a couple of services that experienced a significant decrease in satisfaction, specifically winter snow control and curbside garbage collection.
“We experienced a substantial snow event a couple weeks before the survey kicked-off,” Johnson says.
“We suspect that contributed to the perception of those services, as they were directly affected for a few days while crews worked to clear roads for motorists and curbside collection service vehicles.”
He adds that in general, the 2021 results are comparable to those of the 2020 survey. However, the pandemic did influence some responses.
“For those who said they experienced a decrease in their quality of life in Airdrie, COVID-19 was the main contributor to that,” says Johnson.
“When asked ‘what is the most important issue facing the City of Airdrie’, COVID-19 related issues/impacts/restrictions were third on the list at 13 per cent.
The pandemic was also listed as the main barrier for not participating in public engagement opportunities, and it made the list of topics that respondents would like the City of Airdrie to communicate with them about.
The results of this survey assist the City in identifying key trends and issues of importance in the continuous journey for service excellence, according to Johnson.
“Immediately after the results are presented, we begin our business planning activities for the next one to three years, and these results give us a baseline for how well we are delivering municipal services today,” he adds.
“These results signal to us where we may need to make adjustments in services, focus our communications efforts and upcoming campaigns, or do a deeper dive into specific issues or concerns to gather more details and information from our customers.”
For more information or to review the results of the Citizen Satisfaction Survey, click here.
stacie@frogmediainc.ca
