Olathe is Metro's Best at Providing City Services

Study: Olathe is metro's best at providing city services
By Dan J. Smith, The Olathe News

Olathe residents rank their city as a good place to live, work and raise children in, but city officials acknowledge there still are areas that need improvement.

An annual resident satisfaction survey, presented Tuesday to the Olathe City Council, shows the city is tops among Kansas City-area communities when comparing residents' perceptions of their city services.

In measuring resident satisfaction of broad-based categories, including utility service, communication and overall public safety, Olathe ranked among the top 25 cities in the metro area in seven of eight categories. Enforcement of city codes was the lone exception.

"Overall, it's impressive that Olathe's done so well compared with the rest of the area," said Chris Tatham, vice president of Olathe-based research firm ETC Institute, which conducted the 2005 survey last fall.

The survey, which includes responses from 1,280 residents selected at random, has a 2.8 percent margin of error.Most encouraging, Tatham said, was that 81 percent of respondents — a new high for the metro — said they were satisfied with the overall quality of city services.Also, 95 percent said Olathe is a good or excellent place to live, 92 percent liked the city as a community in which to raise children and 72 percent said Olathe was a favorable environment in which to work.

Routine since ETC's first survey of Olathe residents in 2000, easing the city's east-west traffic congestion and boosting public safety staffing levels rank among residents' top mandates for city leaders to focus future budget and policy talks on.Councilmembers have approved millions in recent budgets to build a highway overpass at 127th Street, raise railroad tracks over four downtown intersections and beef up the city's fire and police forces to address those concerns.

"The practical place where we find ourselves is those are longer-term projects with long-term rewards hopefully," City Manager Michael Wilkes said. "They've taken us several years to get them cranking, and it'll now take a couple of years, I think, before we see some results."

A lack of recreation programming and slow progress in rejuvenating downtown are emerging concerns.The survey showed 53 percent of respondents — 5 percent more than in 2004 — weren't satisfied with the city's slate of senior recreation opportunities. Also, 57 percent gave a dissatisfied or neutral response — up from 49 percent last year — when asked about recreation programs for teenagers.

City leaders have discussed how best to tackle the issue.Talk continues about funding a community center using revenue from the city's eighth-cent parks and recreation sales tax.Ideally, the facility would address Olathe's lack of indoor fitness opportunities, but the council hasn't decided where it will be built, how soon it will open or, most importantly, how much to spend.Scheduling delays and differences of opinion about Olathe's plan to dress up and rebuild a section of Santa Fe Street through downtown, coupled with debate about whether to expand the city's existing parking garage, likely has contributed to a drop-off in residents' support of downtown initiatives.Compared with 2004 numbers, 5 percent fewer respondents are satisfied with the maintenance and preservation of downtown Olathe, according to the survey.

"If you go back to 2000, the first time we did this, and then track where we've spent our money in the last five years, you're going to see that the things that (residents) told us about in 2000 are the exact areas where we spent our money," Wilkes said. "The things that we're seeing now are the areas where we'll be spending our money in the future."

Four percent fewer respondents than last year — 56 percent — were satisfied with the city's enforcement of codes and ordinances. But that result comes with a caveat.

"When you just talk about code enforcement, there's not a lot of people that are really upset about it," Tatham said, "but there's not a lot of people thinking that it's being done in a positive way, so we're getting a lot of neutral responses as well."In general terms, city leaders can claim success from the survey's findings.

The city's overall composite satisfaction score — similar to a consumer confidence rating in economics — increased one point this year to 115 and is up 15 points from when the surveys began. By comparison, the score for the combined Kansas City area is down to 97 from 100 in 2000.

Olathe also earned high satisfaction marks for residential trash collection, which was up 4 percent in 2005 to 91 percent. Tatham and Wilkes credited introduction of the city's automated cart-based system for the improvement.

"We're putting our money exactly where we need to be putting it as a governing body and as an organization," Wilkes said. "That's why we do this (survey) — for people to give us their opinion on our service and how we spend our money, and the results show we're doing the right things and making the right decisions."